Angus Soft Fruits

Strawberries raspberries blackberries blueberries cherries. 

Lucy – Breeding program director. 

The program is about looking for new varieties of strawberries, raspberries and blackberries, specifically new varieties of fruits that exceed current commercials standards in terms of size, yield, flavour, shape and general X of the plants. To make sure we have products that meet both growers demands and customers’ expectations. Customers are anyone from supermarkets to wholesale and catering requirements. 

I’d say the biggest challenge in this industry is around cost of production. This is where expertise comes in as we must look for qualities that lend themselves to cheaper pickings. This can be things such as the way the fruit presents itself, how easy it fits into a punnet and shelf life, so customers can hold stock a little longer. Therefore, there are some things we can do, but as an industry costs are really high at the moment. Labour has increased considerably in recent years not just in the UK, but internationally as well and so we must be facing those challenges head on, and varieties play a huge role in that. 

As a company, we work with lots of other partners within the industry, particularly research partners and there’s a lot of challenges that the whole industry is facing, and we know that we’re struggling together if we work with some of these big Institutes to try and fight some of the issues we’ve got as an industry. These issues can be around technology advancement, such as should we be looking at robotics for example, but also more around the genetics or on the agronomy side of things. We’ve got various projects within the company to make sure that we stay relevant, but also to get funding to help drive these projects forward. 

Within our program, we’ve got a lot of recently new varieties. We’ve just released three new varieties for the Mediterranean climate – these are normally low chilled type strawberry varieties. We’ve got three Ava Alicia, Ava, Catalina and Ava, Sophia, and they are continuing our Ava brand of premium quality fruits but out of Mediterranean, so you’ll be seeing those ramping up in volume over the next few years down in Spain, Portugal, and hopefully eventually, Morocco.  

We’re also recently released two new raspberries, Ava Monet and Ava Dali. These are fantastic raspberries. They are so sweet and so attractive in the punnet, and we think they are really something different, particularly for the UK market. We’ve had fantastic results in Scotland, and we’ve already got plants on order from our growers for next year. They also work well in the Mediterranean and we’ve had good trial results in the off-season, we have Portugal and Spain, so we’re really hoping to get a long season out of these varieties in order to continue to supply good berries all year round. 

We spend a lot of time in our breeding program, looking at sensory qualities, so that’s everything from appearance, taste and texture in your mouth all the way through to aroma. In general, looking for a nice big conical shiny berry, so that when it’s in the punnet it looks really attractive.  

We’re also looking at flavours, so we really want something that’s got a good balance of different flavours in there with an overriding sweetness and strawberry flavour for strawberries, raspberry flavour in the raspberries and of course that fruity blackberry.  

Fun fact about flavour is it highly associated to how the berries look and how the berry smells, so we try to separate the two traits in testing as completely different. We often get people to taste the berries before we ask them to look at them, so we can kind of hide the berries, so they’ve got no preconceived ideas of what that fruit is going to taste like. It’s easy to look at something and view something as looking good or not looking good and before you’ve eaten it you’ve got an expectation of how that fruit is going to taste. It’s our job to siphon those out so that we can ensure we are delivering good tasting berries.