As the country of origin once again becomes a contributing factor in determining what item(s) to purchase, it would be great to be able to search by/exclude country’s.
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A great idea, but if I may be cynical for a moment: we won’t need a ‘manufactured in Australia’ option too often as the majority of non food products, especially electronics & white goods, are made overseas.
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An interesting ask. How would it be treated when a product was for example ‘engineered’ (designed) in Australia, and manufactured in one or more factories (sometimes contract manufacturing) located in China, Indonesia, Turkey, and Thailand among others. The same product could have various origins from time to time as contracts come and go. It happens.
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County of origin is not a single value nor is it fixed in time. I don’t think there is any way to satisfy this request.
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At face value Choice does do that. A snip from the steam mop comparison tables. FWIW every one I picked shows China, but the pop up is also relevant.
While it may or may not be useful in a practical sense, since Choice does publish ‘origin’ there could be a filter but as ‘you and I’ indicated, for what real purpose?
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And what about the 90, 75, 60%s and so on of Australian produced stuff in products, how is that then labbelled/included in the search criteria.
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How about this one.
Purchased a packet of Jarlsberg cheese from our local supermarket and it is labelled ‘Made in Oslo’, ‘Product of Ireland’, Packaged in Germany’. ‘Made in’, ‘Product of’, what’s the difference?
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Yes this is true(for now).
However, there are products made in country’s that people may wish to support in favour of others.
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All completely valid points and questions. Some of which I too have asked myself but do not have answers for.
Precisely why I have put it to the critical and logic thinking choice.community for discussion.
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Your point ‘County of origin is not a single value nor is it fixed in time’ is a valid for now. This may be more relevant as time goes by.
I have asked the question to be proactive, rather than reactive as who knows what the future holds.
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Hi TheBBG
Interesting to note when I looked at Frypans, there is no I disclaimer.
Maybe this is another topic for discussion ‘Consistency’ ?
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Good question. Maybe we need to consider adding 
and/or a %?
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Great example of why I’ve opened the discussion. 
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I am not sure what you mean here. If you are suggesting that the origin of goods will become more homogenous and fixed at some point in the future I see no reason for that to happen. If that is the case why do you think so?
How do you set up simple selection criteria that works on a multi-valued field? Sure it can be done but it isn’t conceptually simple. Is a match any or all or the values and should you distinguish between them? How do you treat ‘made from local and imported ingredients’? Or packed in X, made in Y from components from Z.
Also you suggest the option to include or exclude by a certain value, eg made in Denmark or not made in Denmark. Once again technically not that hard but giving the user such a switch to set has its own problems. They may be unsure what it means or set it one way and forget so all their subsequent searches are the reverse of what they expect. You do not often see that sort of thing on the web and if you do it is usually under an optional ‘advanced search’ panel.
So I see problems with the stability and meaning of data and with implementing the search facility.
If we want to explore yet another can of worms there is the matter of why this is important. We know that some Australians do want to buy Australian but that is not the topic you raised. Even that simpler question is made harder in some areas (particularly foodstuffs) that are made from mixed ingredients. Is the aim broader, to cater for those who want to buy (or not) Swiss? How common would that be? It would help if you told us what you have in mind.
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Food for thought(pardon-the-pun)
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