After years living and working in Italy, Georgie Rogers felt the pull of home, returning to the New England region of northern NSW to raise her children, who are now in primary school.

From her base at high-altitude Armidale, Georgie sources an array of fantastic produce from the country’s top food-growing regions for her Gathered Goods Australia range of bespoke hampers.

In Italy, where she managed villas for high-end tourism operator Abercrombie & Kent, Georgie wandered markets and country lanes in Tuscany in search of locally made produce.

This curating experience left her passionate about forging such connections back in Australia, where so much food provenance has been lost or undervalued.

To curate her Gathered Goods hampers, Georgie has spent countless hours visiting growers and makers and making those all-important connections across the land, where her networks are many generations strong.

A stint in the Yarra Valley after her return from Italy showed Georgie just how far regional Australia had come, with its abundance of fresh farm produce, local wine makers and an established foodie scene. With her partner at the time an Italian wine maker working at a local winery, she had an insider’s view to one of the most exciting flourishing of viticulture in decades.

About this time, Georgie also began to see the challenges many regional producers faced in getting their goods to market, no matter how wonderful they tasted. That’s when idea of a bespoke hamper containing purely regional goods came about.

The products in Gathered Goods hampers can’t be found together on any other platform, with each curation uniquely showcasing the best that regional Australia has to offer.

Each collection tallies the number of regional Australians employed in its creation, reinforcing the message that buying regionally supports local businesses in a world that sometimes seems to forget country people and the incredible work they do feeding us all.