ORGANIC health food suppliers around the world are set to feel the repercussions of a fire in Swan Hill’s industrial estate this week.
Nutrigreen, Australia’s only commercial producer of organic field-grown wheat grass, barley grass and alfalfa leaf, lost a crucial piece of machinery when it went up in flames on Tuesday night — and it may be a month until damaged parts of the purpose-built machine can be replaced.
Sales manager Ray Power said the fire started inside the fine-milling machine around 8.30pm.
“We don’t know the true cause — we probably never will — but it seems something may have come loose and caused a spark,” he said.
While the fire was able to be confined to the machine by a staff member and firefighters, it is now unusable and means the company is unable to manufacture the final product.
“It produces our final product by grinding the coarse particles into a fine powder,” Mr Power said.
It could not have come at a worse time of year for Nutrigreen, which is right in the middle of its annual harvest and already battling to keep up with high demand.
“We produce in excess of 100 tonnes of finished product each year — half of which is exported to 18 different countries,” Mr Power said.
“We’ve been that busy that we’re selling basically all we can produce — we don’t have a lot of stock ready to go.
“Hopefully it won’t take too long, but it’s a purpose-built mill and needs a fair bit of replacement … it may take up to a month.”
Mr Power said while customer retention may present a challenge over the next couple of months, staff would be ready to work around-the-clock once the factory was firing on all cylinders again.
In the meantime, they would continue harvesting Nutrigreen’s crops on Swan Hill-Donald Road and drying product at the Webster Drive factory.
“Nutrigreen has been operating since the early 90s… but it’s really taken off in the past three years within the health food industry,” Mr Power said.
“In Australia there’s quite a large market and it’s growing.”
