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Agriculture makes an important contribution to the Australian economy through food and fibre production, exports and employment. Horticulture is the third largest component of the Australian agricultural industry after meat and grain. It provided employment for almost 60,000 people in 2011/12. However, the number of people employed in horticultural product processing in Australia is declining, partly as a consequence of multinational food manufacturers relocating their commodity fruit and vegetable processing such as freezing and canning to countries with lower costs of production than Australia. Concurrent with the relocation of large-scale fruit and vegetable processing, segments of consumers are increasingly seeking new and unique food experiences with attributes such as low food miles, provenance and assurances of safe and ethical production practices. These can be manufactured by smaller-scale Australian-based processors because consumers seeking these benefits are often prepared to pay price premiums. This means that opportunities exist for Australian niche product manufacturers to develop and market products to satisfy this emerging demand. However, traditional horticultural industry marketing and distribution practices have relied on farmers focusing on efficiencies of production with little need for marketing which means that skills and understanding of marketing of products within the horticultural sector is limited.Market orientation contributes to organisational performance. It involves gathering market intelligence, sharing it widely within the organisation so that all departments can contribute to planning and implementing timely and coordinated responses to the identified opportunities and threats. It is part of organisational culture which in its simplest form is described as "the way we do things around here". Many aspects of market orientation have been published but past research on barriers to adoption of market oriented behaviour have focused on broad cultural issues rather than specific beliefs. Understanding specific beliefs of founders, owners and senior managers is important because beliefs influence behaviour. Research on the subject of market orientation in agriculture is limited and there are few studies on market orientation in horticulture, particularly in Australia. This research was conducted to determine the salient beliefs of top management teams of vertically-integrated horticultural enterprises that influenced the degree of market orientation adopted by their organisations.The research employed a qualitative approach involving 52 semi-structured interviews of founders, owners and senior managers reporting to them from four Australian verticallyPage ii integrated horticultural enterprises located in south east Queensland and northern New South Wales. These organisations were purposefully selected as typical. Two firms with annual incomes of $30m -$40m and managed by employed managers, and two with annual incomes of less than $2m managed by family members were selected a...