What the Pesticide Testing Found, and What It Didn’t

A charity bought 78 samples of fruit and veg out of Aldi, Coles and Woolworths, sent them to a lab the same day, and published what came back. Four results came back over the Australian limit. The biggest reading was on strawberries, a fungicide at nine and a half times the level allowed.

The testing was done for Pesticide Action Australia, a not-for-profit, and it sits in a report they’re calling Australia’s Residue Report 2026. They bought 13 kinds of produce in five capital cities back in June: apples, avocados, bananas, blueberries, broccoli, capsicum, cucumber, grapes, lettuce, potatoes, rockmelon, strawberries and tomatoes. Nine’s Tilli Andrew wrote it up on 7 October, which is where I came across it.

The four over the line, from the report’s own table: bifenthrin on grapes at five and a half times the limit, bupirimate on strawberries at nine and a half, then fipronil and permethrin on capsicum, where there’s no Australian limit set for either and the group couldn’t find a label or permit that allows them. There’s another eight detections they think might be off-label use, mostly on capsicum, and they’ve asked the APVMA to confirm it. That confirmation hasn’t happened yet.

Where the bigger numbers come from

Four is the number that means a limit got broken. The figures doing the rounds are a lot bigger than four, and they’re counting different things.

Across the 78 samples there were 201 separate residues, from 54 different pesticides. Fifty-six per cent of samples had at least one pesticide on them that isn’t approved for use in the European Union. Forty-four per cent had something the report counts as a PFAS pesticide, the forever chemicals.

Not approved in Europe isn’t the same as over the limit here. The two keep different lists, and a chemical can be registered and used inside the rules on an Australian farm while being off the books in France. That gap is a fair thing to ask about, and I said so back in August when we fact-checked a reel making a much wilder version of this argument. It’s a different claim from the four, though.

Same goes for the forever chemicals count. In that same August piece, Pesticide Action Australia was the group calling an insecticide a forever chemical under European definitions, and not every regulator agrees the definition fits. I’m not going to call that settled now just because the number’s got bigger and it happens to suit me.

Two caveats, and neither of them is mine. The report says straight out that it’s a snapshot, and that its percentages describe these 78 samples rather than national averages. Nine printed the other one, which is that going over a maximum residue limit doesn’t automatically mean something is unsafe to eat.

What the report is actually asking for

The asks are aimed at the supermarkets and at government, not at your shopping list. In its own words, Pesticide Action Australia wants supermarkets to have pesticide reduction policies, greater transparency and real support for growers, and it wants them to improve the transparency and efficacy of their own residue testing. From government it wants testing expanded and made transparent, and real help for farmers moving to what it calls nature-friendly farming. That last one is aimed at growers rather than shoppers.

The report makes a point I hadn’t thought about. The last Total Diet Study on agricultural chemicals came out in 2019, on samples collected back in 2013 and 2014. And the report says that over the last five years, the only fresh fruit and veg volunteered for testing under the National Residue Survey have been apples and pears. If that’s right, there isn’t much public data to check any of this against, which is sort of the whole problem.

The APVMA, which sets the limits, said suspected breaches go to the relevant state or territory authority, and that where non-compliance turns up, the control-of-use authority acts on it.

All three supermarkets said they test. Aldi said its produce suppliers have to meet recognised food safety standards, and that it runs its own risk-based surveillance testing on top of what the suppliers do. Coles said food safety is its highest priority, that its produce comes from certified growers, that its supply chains are independently audited, and that it’s been testing for residues for decades. Woolworths said its growers are independently audited under the Harmonised Australian Retailer Produce Scheme, which requires residue testing, and that it complies with FSANZ and the APVMA.

I’ve got no reason to doubt any of that. All three can be telling the truth and it still doesn’t tell you what’s on the tomato in your hand, because none of those results get published anywhere you could look before dinner. That’s the complaint in the report, and it’s a fair one.

Washing gets some of it off

The group’s advice to shoppers is to wash fresh produce, which does shift some of what’s sitting on the skin. What it won’t necessarily reach is anything that’s made its way into the fruit or veg itself.

We ran into this with apples in August. Australian apples can legally be treated after harvest with a fungicide called thiabendazole, and studies show some of it ends up in the peel, where washing won’t get to it. So wash your veg, just don’t count on it doing the whole job.

Asking the person who grew it

This is the bit where a bloke with a farm-gate app is supposed to tell you the farm gate fixes all of it. It doesn’t. Not really.

Growers who sell at their own gate use registered chemicals too. There’s no lab behind a roadside table, and usually no audit trail either. When that reel came through my feed in August with a slide saying small local farmers don’t do any of this, it was pretty much free marketing pointed straight at me, and we checked it anyway and said it doesn’t hold as a blanket rule. I’m not about to walk that back because a headline’s turned up that I like better.

What a gate gives you is someone to ask. You can stand there and ask what went on it, when it was sprayed, when it was picked. You might get a shrug. You might get ten minutes on exactly which week the aphids showed up and what they did about it. Either way there’s a name attached to the answer.

That’s why I keep writing these. A stall isn’t purer, and I don’t say it is. What keeps pulling me back is that nearly every food story I’ve followed this year, from the food fraud investigation through to this one, comes down to how many strangers end up standing between you and whoever grew it, and how little any of them can tell you.

Download the app, open the map, and find local. SideStall is free on the App Store and Google Play, or you can have a look at some of the stalls on the web first.

For the record: the testing is Pesticide Action Australia’s Australia’s Residue Report 2026, from produce bought in June 2026. The itemised exceedances, the eight possible off-label detections, the snapshot caveat, the organisation’s asks and the National Residue Survey point come from the report’s own page, read 8 October 2026. On the count: Nine and news.com.au both describe four samples as over the limit, while the report lists four instances, two of them on capsicum, so four results is the safe way to say it. The date of the last Total Diet Study is from FSANZ. The washing advice, the three supermarkets’ statements and the note that exceeding a limit does not automatically mean something is unsafe were reported by Nine’s Tilli Andrew on 7 October 2026. The 201 residues, the 54 pesticides, the 56 and 44 per cent figures and the APVMA’s statement were reported by news.com.au on 7 October 2026. The thiabendazole point is from our own August fact-check and the sources cited there.