Purple Possum: Organic Produce
For many years, we have stopped while driving through St. Marys on Tasmania’s East Coast, to visit the Purple Possum store and café which has an extensive stock of organic produce.
From the outside you may not expect much, but once inside you will see the carefully chosen items that await you. Their useful Web site outlines some of the items you will find:
Flour, grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, honey and sweets. The bins usually have Tasmanian walnuts, raw almonds, pistachios and banana chips.
They even have a process such that you can buy a quantity of peanuts and then use their device for crushing the nuts into “peanut butter”.
The Purple Possum also has cafe facilities such that you can order a coffee (and if you take milk it can be from a cow or from a plant). The coffee beans come from a roaster in Invermay called Ritual Coffee, which is a very good roaster and which seeks out good coffee sources.
The coffee options at Ritual Coffee are generally excellent and might include a Guatemalan coffee from Gilberto Ramirez who farms his Caturra coffee at 1650 metres above sea level, for example, but they also have many other excellent coffees that may be at Purple Possum.
You can also order other drinks such as normal tea and herbal teas, iced chocolate, a green smoothie (made with organic greens) and a turmeric latte.
If you are just there for a drink and a snack then you may want to accompany your drink with a slice of one of their two famous cakes, namely the Magic Bean Chocolate Cake or the Rhubarb Cake.
If you want to linger longer, then the Purple Possum also offers more substantial dishes available for lunch or a late breakfast such as meusli, a vegan “Purple Possum Burger”, beef pies, chicken pies and vegetarian pies made by the wonderful people at Summer Kitchen Bakery.
We should talk a little about how to get to St Marys because opinions vary about the best way to get there. Let’s start with Launceston. We often visit Launceston for business reasons and then drive back to Hobart via the East Coast. From Launceston there are two ways to achieve this. The first is to drive through Scottsdale and then proceed to St Helens via the beautiful valley containing the town of Pyengana. Once you reach St Helens there is some spectacular coastal scenery to enjoy.
As you head down the East Coast, you can take a detour which takes you along a winding road up to St Marys. After visiting the Purple Possum you can then drive back down the hills via the winding Elephant Pass (we have no idea why it has that name due to a complete lack of elephants!). You energe from the hills at Chain of Lagoons and then can proceed to the pleasant coastal town of Bicheno where you can enjoy a lunch of crayfish overlooking The Gulch and its perfect views.
An alternative from Launceston is to drive down the main road to Hobart until you nearly reach Campbell Town and then take the A4 through Avoca and Fingal past some of the state’s richest farming land. This road leads directly to St Marys without the need to negotiate sharp corners.
And, of course, you can drive from Hobart up the East Coast to Coles Bay and it is a pleasant drive from there to St Marys.
Additional information
Name: Purple Possum
Street: 5 Story Street
Town: 7215, St Marys
Opening hours: Mon-Fri, 10am – 4pm, Sat, 10am – 3pm, Sun closed
We have also mentioned this venue in our story about eating of the East Coast here.
You can read more about Purple Possum on their own Web site here.
