$5 Home Delivery On $150+ Leichhardt Click & Collect
Is Home Delivery available for your suburb? Request

Why We Celebrate Organic Awareness Month

Why We Celebrate Organic Awareness Month

Every September, Australia marks Organic Awareness Month. Over in Britain they run Organic September at the same time. The Americans call theirs National Organic Month. Same four weeks, three countries, one shared idea: take a bit of time to explain something a label on its own can't.

We join in every year. Here's what the month actually is, why a country sitting on the world's largest area of certified organic farmland still needs one, and where to find everything we've written about why organic is important.

What Australian Organic Awareness Month actually is

Australian Organic Awareness Month runs the length of September. It's organised by Australian Organic, the industry body behind the Australian Certified Organic Bud you'll spot on a lot of our shelves.

It isn't a sale, and that's rather the point. The campaign exists to help people "learn, shop, and connect more consciously, backed by certification you can trust," and it's run recently under the theme Nourish Yourself. Nurture the Planet. The four weeks each have their own focus: The Bigger Picture, then Find Your 'Why', then Tread Softly, finishing on Take Your Next Organic Step.

Look at that shape and you can see what the month is really doing. It starts with soil and ecosystems and finishes with one small decision a real person can make on a Thursday afternoon, standing in front of a shelf with a basket on their arm.

The same month, other countries

In the UK, Organic September is run by the Soil Association, a charity, and their pitch is even simpler. Try organic, see the difference. They ask for one swap in a weekly shop. Not a conversion.

We're fond of that framing. Nobody has ever changed how they eat because a poster told them to. You change one thing, it turns out better, and the next thing follows on its own.

Why Australia needs an organic awareness month more than most

This is the bit that makes the month worth more than a hashtag.

Australia farms roughly 53 million hectares of certified organic land. That's the largest organic area of any country on earth and close to half the global certified total, according to FiBL and IFOAM's World of Organic Agriculture 2026. We are, by land, the biggest organic country there is.

Now the awkward part. The word itself carries no legal weight once the food is sold here. The ACCC says plainly that "organic" is not formally regulated in Australia, and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry confirms there's no mandatory requirement for certification of organic product sold domestically. Certification only becomes compulsory on the way out of the country, for export.

Put those two facts side by side. We grow more organic food than anyone, we sell it into a home market where the word is essentially unpoliced, and then we ask shoppers to work out the difference for themselves, mid-aisle, from the front of a packet.

That gap is what an awareness month is for. Not to shift more stock. To make the difference readable.

More people are buying organic, which makes the confusion worse

Australian Organic's Australian Organic Market Report 2026 found certified organic sales and exports passed $1.02 billion for the first time in FY2024/25. Of that, $657.6 million was domestic retail, up 11.9% in a year. Volumes rose. So did buyer numbers and how often people bought. All of it through a cost-of-living squeeze, which frankly surprised us.

Globally, organic retail hit €145 billion in 2024. Across the EU, 11.1% of farmland is certified organic. In Switzerland organic accounts for 12.3% of all food sold, which is the number we keep coming back to, because it shows what ordinary looks like when the category grows up.

Growing categories attract loose language, though. The more people reach for organic food, the more products borrow the word without doing the work behind it. The 2026 report flagged exactly this: consumer confusion caused by uncertified products using organic labelling, named as a live problem for the industry.

Why a Sydney organic grocer bothers with it

We run two shops, one on Flood Street in Leichhardt and one on Falcon Street in Crows Nest. We'd be kidding you if we claimed a month dedicated to organic food does nothing for us commercially.

But the reason we take part is narrower than that. Most of what separates a decent organic grocer from a wall of green packaging is information you can't see from the aisle. Who grew it. What the certification covers and what it doesn't. Why one line on the shelf is certified and the one beside it isn't. What happened to that piece of fruit between the orchard and the crate.

September gives us licence to say all of that out loud, properly, without it sounding like a sales pitch. For the other eleven months it has to fit on a shelf ticket.

Our education series: why organic is important

Everything below is ours. Written for Australian shoppers, free to read, no email required. If you've got ten minutes this September, start at the top of the first list and stop whenever you like.

Start here: what organic actually means

What's actually on conventional produce

And what you can do about it

Four things worth doing this September

  1. Turn one packet over. Find the certification mark and the operator number printed with it. Once you've seen where it lives on a pack, you won't stop noticing it.
  2. Make one swap, not twelve. Take the thing you buy every single week and buy the certified organic version of that one. Repeat volume beats a one-off gesture every time.
  3. Ask us the question you think sounds silly. "Is this actually organic?" is the best thing you can ask a grocer. We would much rather answer it than have you guess.
  4. Read one thing from the list above. Any of them. That's genuinely the whole point of the month.

Come and see us at Leichhardt or Crows Nest, or have a look at what's in now across fresh produce, fruit and vegetables.

Frequently asked questions

When is Organic Awareness Month in Australia?

Australian Organic Awareness Month runs every September. It's organised by Australian Organic, the industry body behind the Australian Certified Organic Bud logo.

Is Organic Awareness Month the same as Organic September?

They're separate campaigns sharing a month. Organic September is run in the United Kingdom by the Soil Association. Australian Organic Awareness Month is our version of it, and September is marked in the United States as National Organic Month.

Why does Australia need an organic awareness month?

Because "organic" isn't a regulated term for products sold within Australia. Certification is only mandatory for export, so shoppers have to rely on certification marks rather than the word on the front of the pack, and that takes some explaining.

What's the point if I already buy organic food?

Mostly the detail underneath. Which certifier stands behind a given product, which fruit and vegetables carry the highest pesticide residues, and which reassuring phrases on a label mean absolutely nothing.

Where can I buy certified organic food in Sydney?

We're at 51-53 Flood Street, Leichhardt and 25 Falcon Street, Crows Nest, both stocking certified organic fruit, vegetables and groceries. Home delivery runs from the Leichhardt store in a refrigerated van.

Sources

Last reviewed September 2026.

Previous Next
103
491