How It All Started
Sunshine Tropical began operations in 1977 as a joint venture between Bill and Noelene Hughes who were passionfruit growers and Bill and Lyn Taylor the original owners of The Big Pineapple tourist attraction. A small factory was built at 320 Image Flat Road, Nambour and the company began processing passionfruit. At the time there were 42 passionfruit growers in the Sunshine Coast area supplying passionfruit to the factory.
Expanding Our Horizons: From Local Fruits to Diverse Food Service Products
The company also looked at other local fruits to process and started to process local strawberries, pineapples, pawpaws, bananas, avocadoes rockmelons and mangoes. It was during this time that Sunshine Tropical took the opportunity to supply quality fruit products into the Food Service market. The company continued to grow and looked at other products including a large selection of Jams, Chutney’s and Sauces.
The company was making these jams and glass bottled products under its own label and also contract manufacturing for other customers. In 1996 we put in a fully automated glass bottling line and continued to make jam up until 2014
Pioneering Mango Processing & Diversifying into New Markets
Sunshine Tropical was one of the first companies in Australia to see the potential in local mangoes particularly the Kensington Pride variety and started processing them, working with the Department of Primary Industries to develop a mango skinning and slicing machine to provide mango products to
customers all year round.
Today mango is still one of our biggest selling lines and we have built a solid reputation for supplying great mango products.
In 2011 our company diversified into producing Home brew beer starter packs under contract for Brigalow and Coopers Brewing. Mixing and pasteurizing the beer blends and canning the product before being sent out to beer retailers. We continued to do the Beer packs until 2023 when we decided to refocus our business solely on fruit products.
More recently we have been doing a lot of work with stabilised fruit preparations for the dairy industry as well as customised fruit blends for specific applications. We have built a solid reputation for supplying quality fruit products, over the last 47 years, use our experience to help you with your fruit needs.