New Zealand food delivered to Melbourne

If you are searching for a Kiwi shop in Melbourne, the useful answer is that the shop is in Auckland and it posts. An order packed on a Monday is usually on a Melbourne doorstep by Wednesday or Thursday.

That is worth saying plainly. Melbourne has more people searching for New Zealand food than any other Australian city, and most of them are looking for somewhere they can walk into. There are a handful of those. What they carry is a fraction of a New Zealand supermarket aisle, and it is usually the same handful of things.

Melbourne gets the best of the weather

This is the one genuine advantage Melbourne has over Brisbane, Perth and the Gold Coast when it comes to ordering food from overseas. The summer is shorter, the average maxima are lower, and a parcel sitting on a doorstep for an afternoon in October is in no real danger.

That means chocolate. A Whittaker’s block is a sensible order to Melbourne for most of the year, where on the Gold Coast page we tell people to wait until winter. Same parcel, same shipping time, different advice, because the last few hours on the doorstep are the ones that matter.

January and February still warrant a thought. If a heatwave is forecast the week you order, send biscuits instead and come back for the blocks in March.

Why these four

Nobody has sent us enough Melbourne orders to say what the city buys. Rather than invent a pattern, we picked on weather and on what people write in asking for. Blocks that would be a gamble in Queensland. The Pineapple Lumps that nobody finds in a Coles aisle.

A word on the biscuits, since they are the half of the order people forget. Toffee Pops are the ones that come up most in messages from Melbourne, usually from someone who has been describing them to an Australian colleague and getting nowhere. They post well and they add almost nothing to a box that is already going. They are also the closest thing to proof that the New Zealand biscuit aisle is a genuinely different aisle.