Australia Tested Its Supermarket Fruit and Veg. Who Tests Ours?

On Wednesday, an Australian charity published the results of an experiment anyone with a lab budget could run.

Pesticide Action Australia bought fruit and vegetables from Aldi, Coles and Woolworths in five capital cities in June. The produce went to an independent lab the day it was bought.

Across 78 samples of 13 foods, the lab found 201 pesticide residues.

Four samples were over Australia's legal limits. The worst was Sydney strawberries carrying one fungicide at nearly ten times the limit. A capsicum bought in Perth contained fipronil, an insecticide with no permitted residue on that crop at all. Pesticide Action Australia classifies fipronil as a PFAS, one of the "forever chemicals."

9News, which reported the results, was careful to add that a single test round is a snapshot, and that going over a limit doesn't automatically make food unsafe.

It still led the news across the Tasman. The obvious question from this side is who does the same for us.

The answer is the government. As far as I can find, only the government.

300 samples a year

New Zealand Food Safety, part of MPI, runs the Food Residues Survey Programme. Each year it collects 300 samples of plant-based food and tests each one for more than 500 compounds.

The latest report, published in March 2026, covers July 2024 to June 2025. It tested 251 samples grown here and 49 imported.

Ten results came back over the legal limit. They came from six samples. All six were grown in New Zealand. Every imported sample complied.

Here's what was over:

• Watercress: indoxacarb, an insecticide, at 1.8 mg/kg. The limit is 0.1. That's eighteen times over.
• Beans: sulfoxaflor, another insecticide, at 1.3 mg/kg against a limit of 0.1.
• Lettuce: acephate, an organophosphate insecticide, at 2.6 mg/kg against 2.0, with a fungicide over its limit in the same sample.
• Spinach: fipronil at 0.18 mg/kg, almost double its 0.1 limit, alongside another insecticide that was also over.

Fipronil. The same insecticide that put a Perth capsicum on Australian television.

The growers' explanations, as the report records them, read like a list of ways things go wrong on a farm. A mixing tank that wasn't cleaned between chemicals. Spray drift. Chemicals used in ways the label doesn't cover. The spinach grower couldn't identify where either residue came from.

New Zealand Food Safety assessed every breach and found no food safety risk in any of them.

Two ways to count

The report says the ten failed results were less than 0.01% of the 151,524 results it reported.

That's true. It's also a big denominator. Each of the 300 samples is checked for hundreds of chemicals, and every check counts as a result.

Count samples instead and it looks different. Six of 300 samples broke the limit last year, which is 2%. The year before, eight of 300 did. In 2022-23, RNZ reported 33 breaches from 27 samples, which is 9% of that year's 300.

Neither way of counting is wrong. They answer different questions. MPI's tells you how growers do across hundreds of possible chemicals. The other tells you how often a bag of greens is over the line.

The Australian headline number, 201 residues, counted every detection, whether it was over a limit or not. The two most recent New Zealand reports list the breaches. They don't say how many samples carried residues under the limit. So the two countries' results can't be lined up side by side, however tempting it is.

What happens after a breach

When a sample fails, New Zealand Food Safety traces it back to the grower and goes through their spray diaries. The response is education about correct chemical use. A grower with repeat failures may get a site visit.

In June 2025, RNZ reported that not a single fine or recall had been issued in at least five years, across 75 breaches. MPI had sent "educational letters" to seven businesses since 2020. About seven companies had gone over the limits more than once in that time.

MPI called its approach international best practice. Its deputy director-general Vincent Arbuckle told RNZ that none of the breaches posed a food safety risk, and that recalls and prosecution were there for cases where one did.

What isn't on the list

Glyphosate.

RNZ reported that MPI hasn't tested for it in its annual monitoring since 2015. That was the year testing found a third of wheat samples over the legal limit, some by 50 times.

In October 2025, New Zealand Food Safety kept the glyphosate limit for wheat, barley and oats at 0.1 mg/kg. It said spraying those crops just before harvest is no longer common practice here.

The sampling plan for July 2026 to June 2027 lists every compound the programme will report this year. I went through all of it. Glyphosate isn't on it. Fipronil is.

The Australian door

There's one more rule worth knowing.

Food grown in New Zealand has to meet New Zealand's residue limits. Food imported from Australia can meet either New Zealand's limits or Australia's.

So a residue that's legal on an Australian mango is legal on that mango here, whatever our own limit says.

The four Australian samples in this week's report were over Australia's own limits, so that rule wouldn't have covered them. And every Australian sample in last year's New Zealand programme complied. But the door is there.

What's being tested right now

This year's 300 samples are already being collected. The foods include strawberries, blueberries, table grapes, avocados, bananas, kiwifruit, cucumbers, capsicums and tomatoes.

That's a lot of overlap with the Australian list.

If it follows last year's timing, the results will land around March 2028. By then most of this summer's strawberries will be a distant memory, which is the trouble with testing anything you eat within a week.

The last time anyone else looked

The most recent independent test of New Zealand produce I could find was by Consumer NZ, from around 2020.

It tested 16 locally grown fruit and vegetables for more than 200 pesticides. It found 16 pesticides, nine of them banned in the European Union. Kale from Pak'nSave carried acephate above the legal limit.

None of the organic produce in that test had any residues.

That fits with what happens when people switch to eating organic and measure their urine. Change the food and the pesticides change with it.

Since then, I haven't found a single published lab test of New Zealand supermarket produce by anyone outside government.

Australia's fipronil was on a capsicum from Perth. Ours was on spinach, in a government report published in March.

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