Yuri and Fab Angele, the sons of 86-year-old business owner Giorgio, run the family-owned business. And as Yuri tells The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, "every week I get a request from somewhere in Asia - China, Singapore, Hong Kong - to open up a Brunetti store". "South-east Asia is a big opportunity for us but we have to have the infrastructure in place, too. You can't do it ad hoc and you can't risk the core business," he says. At the moment, Brunetti exports the packaging, boxes and bags used to house its cakes from Melbourne to the Singapore store, which is owned by a franchisee. In the future, Yuri says, he'd like to be exporting a lot more than that - frozen pastries and cakes made in Melbourne that would only need to be finished in store, and which would ensure Brunetti-level quality is maintained, no matter where a cafe might be located in the region. Opportunities for Australians For years we've been told that Australia's economy is shifting from a mining boom to a dining boom, as the sale of Australian food and agricultural products into Asia (and around the world) ramps up, and the heat goes out of the mining boom.

The Angeles' cafe is just a small example of the opportunities opening up for Australian businesses in south-east Asia, to be both the region's "food bowl" and the supplier of higher-end food and beverage products to an area with a huge and growing population and a rising middle class. Regional free trade deals with the ASEAN bloc, with individual countries (including China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore) the soon-to-be ratified deal with Indonesia, and the still-to-be finalised Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, all help. From cakes to big-volume beef and lamb exports to beer and malt extracts used for cereal and confectionery, Australian produce and products are increasingly finding their way into Asian markets. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of the pastry. Economist Tim Harcourt is in no doubt that "we are moving from a mining boom to a dining boom".

"Most of it is based on the growing middle class in ASEAN, improving living standards and to some extent a reduction in tariffs," he says. "There's beef and the high-end of the meat industry, cereals, and then in [agricultural] tech there are companies that provide technology and training in China, India and in ASEAN. Australia can’t feed the region but it can improve capacity." Harcourt, an economist and author based at the University of New South Wales, disputes the characterisation of Australia as China's quarry and Japan's beach. "We actually have 53,000 exporters. Ten thousand Australian companies export goods to China alone." 'A growing population ... like our produce' Australian cattle command a premium price in Asian markets. Credit:James Alcock

At the other end of the scale to the Carlton cafe is the Consolidated Pastoral Company (CPC), a $600 million beef cattle behemoth that has 300,000 head of cattle over 3.2 million hectares across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. CPC is the largest private cattle company in Australia and currently in the middle of a management buyout from its majority-European owners. It also owns two feed lots on Indonesia's island of Sumatra, to which it sends about 60,000 live cattle per year. That accounts for about 60 per cent of the company's revenue, with the balance coming from boxed beef sold into the North American, Japanese and South Korean markets. It's difficult to walk into a supermarket in Jakarta - or other south-east Asian capitals - and miss the prominent signs advertising Australian beef for sale. It's a synonym for quality. CPC's Troy Setter has heard the line about a shift from a mining to dining boom for years - it's hardly news to the chief executive of a company that has been operating in Indonesia for 20 years - and he's a little cautious in embracing it. "We are certainly seeing a couple of things," he says. "First, there is a growing population in Asia who like our produce, and really good produce at that. And second, average incomes are increasing significantly. And once you step up in income, you step up in calorie consumption and higher-quality calorie consumption.

"We market meat that comes from CPC into Indonesia as safe, nutritious, trustworthy and reliable." Setter estimates that in an average supermarket in Jakarta, 15 per cent of the meat comes from CPC. (Jakarta is home to some 10 million people, and the greater metropolitan region to about 30 million.) Throughout the region, Australian beef is sold for everything from $40 burgers and $100 wagyu steaks to leaner, more fat-free beef used in traditional stir-fry cooking. Setter says the Indonesia-Australia free trade deal, which both governments hope to ratify by the of the year, will mean cheaper beef for Indonesian consumers, greater regulatory certainty for his company and confidence to invest in new areas such as horticultural products. That's because the tariffs on Australian beef and lamb will be slashed to zero or near-zero, longer term quotas on cattle exports will be locked in and, in the horticultural sector, tariffs will fall significantly - from 25 to 10 per cent on mandarins, potatoes and carrots for example, though tonnage limits will still apply.

Indonesia's farmers are still so protected by tariffs that a single, ordinary Australian cauliflower can cost as much as $50 at a higher-end supermarket in Jakarta. 'We have to export to grow' Coopers exports more than just beer to south-east Asia. South Australia's Coopers beer is now a welcome sight in supermarkets and bottle shops in south-east Asian capitals. The company turned over $237 million in sales of all products in 2017-18, and is one of many companies selling into Asian markets. Exports made up just 2 per cent of Coopers' total beer sales.

But beer sales are only a small part of the company's export story. Bulk malt extracts, used as an ingredient in cereal and confectionery by major international manufacturers such as Kellogg's and Mars in countries like Thailand, is a lower margin, higher volume product sold out of Australia. The third leg is home brew kits. Coopers sells half its kits to overseas markets, and is the largest retailer of such products in the world. The company's export manager Scott Harris says 2 per cent of beer sales is "still a lot, believe me", and that the country's primary markets have been New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom - but that's starting to change. "Because we have such a large share of domestic markets for bulk extracts and home brew, we have to export to grow," he says. "Now Asia is growing for us – China, Japan, Korea and parts of mainland Europe. We are also sold in Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia." Harris says free-trade deals aren't the be-all-and-end-all for a company like Coopers but they do allow the company to get its products into new markets with less red tape, and at a lower price. "With beer importers, they tend to import from all around the world, so they might compare Coopers with another product from another market with no free-trade agreement. So they might think they will go with Coopers because of the FTA."

But for all the talk of a dining boom, and the benefits of regional and bilateral free trade deals, it's important to keep things in perspective. Loading According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, in 2008-09, Australia's total merchandise exports (which includes all resources and other products) were worth $298 billion, of which $40.5 billion consisted of agricultural products. Ten years later, total merchandise exports totalled $379 billion - while agricultural exports had risen to $50.7 billion. In other words, the overall contribution of agriculture, fisheries and forestry to Australia's GDP has declined, proportionally, relative to mining, even as the whole dollar figures have risen.

The biggest growth - of course - has taken place in China. The superpower has risen from 17 per cent of our merchandise 10 years ago to 36 per cent in 2018-19, and from 10.7 per cent of our agricultural export market to 28.2 per cent. In the same period, ASEAN nations' share rose from 15.8 per cent of our agricultural export market to 17 per cent 10 years later. So while the 600 million-person-strong market in ASEAN is growing in importance as a market for Australian companies, it will be some time before the dining boom actually supplants the mining boom.