Business Opportunities Weblog

March 11, 2008 by Angela Shupe | 1 Comment

My Small Business:

When you hear Steve Marafiote has been working in the food business for more than 20 years it might not come as a surprise to discover his company turns over $25 million a year.

What might surprise is that Marafiote is only 32. His company Australian Quality Plus is less than five years old and his first job in the industry was serving customers in his family’s fruit shop in Adelaide.

”Every day after school I was working, and on the weekends too. I started serving customers when I was 11 years old,” Marafiote says.

Marafiote still works seven days a week but his customer base has shifted from grocery shoppers in suburban Adelaide to the likes of the King of Jordan, the Sheik of Dubai, Emirates Airlines and the Burj-Al Arab seven-star hotel. And that’s only in the Middle East.

Australian Quality Plus supplies perishable foods – dairy, meat, fruit, vegetables and Australian bush foods – to 24 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe and island nations including Mauritius and the Maldives. Its target markets include hotel chains and high end food providers.

After completing his commerce degree at Adelaide University, Marafiote worked with Chiquita Foods for five years before taking a role with the Federal Government developing food export markets. He travelled extensively in both these roles, primarily to the Middle East, where he noticed business opportunities.

”You could see it was a vibrant market that was growing. Chefs and retailers were telling us that and we recognised that we needed to do something to take that opportunity.

”[Food] was definitely something I had history in and there was a void and it seemed a natural fit to do at that stage,” he says.

Australian Quality Plus was an immediate success, turning over $140,000 in the first six months, $8.8 million the following year and increasing successively over the years to reach $20.6 million last financial year.

Thanks to Steve Marafiote’s ability to notice a business opportunity when he saw it, he managed to create a highly successful business in an area that he knew plenty about – food. Steve’s success story is a great inspiration for someone looking into opportunities that may be available in different areas of the food business.

In Food, News, Success | 1 Comment