Welcome to NQ Fresh

NQ Fresh Pty Ltd is situated 2 km south of Gumlu, North Queensland in the rain shadow of Cape Upstart, which is the ideal melon growing region of Australia. With a well-defined wet season, followed by sunshine for 8 months this provides the longest continual production season in Australia for Melons, Capsicums and Mangoes.

NQ Fresh is situated on the Bruce Highway and was established in 1994 by Col Kiehne, Joe Totorica, Russell Chapman and Joe Zabala who decided to pool their resources and jointly build a packing shed with the best equipment, so that they could concentrate on their individual farms. In 2005 Joe Zabala sold his share of the business to Alan Hickmott. These four individual growers now market their produce under the banner of NQ Fresh.

The four growers keep up with advances in agricultural and agronomic trends striving for constant improvements and innovation in all aspects of agriculture from GPS controlled traffic to irrigation monitoring and soil structure and health. Each grower has a long farming history in the area, with second and third generations developing and improving their farming models to ensure the longevity of the business and farming community in this area. Thus ensuring the cohesion and constant improvement to NQ Fresh from planting to dispatch in refrigerated transport.

Today NQ Fresh has a steady and consistent supply of produce from April to December specialising in Rockmelon, Honey Dew, Capsicums and Mango for both the domestic and export Markets. In the nineteen years that NQ Fresh has been operating, it has continually developed and improved technologies to ensure premium produce which are packed and transported daily to ensure farm freshness and quality.

To provide confidence for our distributors, NQ Fresh is accredited with a number of Australia and New Zealand quality assurance and food safety standards these include HACCP, WQA and FreshCare.