UK: Marks & Spencer sells 20 million strawberries in seven days
‘To give you an indication of how important they are to Sainsbury’s, for the next four or five months they’ll be our top-selling line in the whole business,’ says the supermarket’s Simon Hinks. ‘It’s the longest period of time any product remains No.1 in our whole business, which is why we spend so much time and effort to get it right.’
And much of that time and effort is spent in a small corner of north Kent that just about manages to cling on to its bucolic past, despite the fact its hop gardens and orchards have long ago been grubbed up and new housing estates nibble at its fringe.
The globally renowned East Malling Research (EMR) was founded in 1913 by an association of 600 fruit growers (and these days a charitable trust). It lends its name to a host of fruit varieties, from blackcurrants (‘Malling Jet’), gooseberries (‘Malling Invicta’), raspberries (‘Malling Jewel’) and apples and pears.
Its most famous strawberries are ‘Cupid’, ‘Pandora’, ‘Vibrant’, and a new one from last year (EMR’s 100th birthday): ‘Malling Centenary’, the first ever fruit hybrid to be shortlisted for Plant of the Year at Chelsea Flower Show.
The ‘Malling Centenary’ looks plumper and more uniform than the ‘Elsanta’, but Whitehouse declares himself unimpressed by this particular sample of his creation. ‘Not as sweet as we’re used to, a bit watery for me.’
‘We raise 13,000 plants each year and from those we’ll only select 1 per cent to go forward for further trial. We get cheese flavour coming through sometimes, we’ve had black pepper, banana, pineapple, stilton. You have to decide whether there’s a market for them.’
The whittling down to just a single superstar berry takes up to eight years, until the chosen one is presented to the supermarkets to test on consumers.
The perky-looking ‘Malling Centenary’ has more breeding than most Derby winners but Johnson says, sadly: ‘Shoppers don’t often look at variety names. We’re trying to promote names because often people go to a supermarket and say, “Oh I had a great punnet of strawberries last week and this week they’re not so good.” But they’re a different variety.’
The breeders’ original remit in the Eighties was to extend the British strawberry season from six weeks. Thanks to selective breeding and the greater use of hothouses and ‘plasticulture’, it can now stretch from March to December. ‘It cuts down on imports,’ says Whitehouse. However, it also means that swathes of countryside are covered in polythene — turning parts of Kent into a sort of giant supermarket plastic fruit tray.
Dr Richard Harrison, a molecular biologist at EMR, is looking at breeding soil-pathogen resistance into plants. ‘This is an arms race,’ he says, showing me a £80,000 genome sequencer. ‘It’s all about identifying natural resistance.’
A criticism often levelled at the modern supermarket strawberry — the ubiquitous ‘Elsanta’ in particular — is that they’re tasteless compared to the varieties of yesteryear, although as celebrity greengrocer Charlie Hicks says, it is not entirely the berry’s fault.
‘If it’s grown properly, it can be very tasty,’ he claims. ‘The problem is that, because of the enormous pressure from supermarkets on growers to produce higher yields at lower prices, it means pumping the produce full of water.’
But Dr Mark Else, who heads EMR’s ‘resource efficiency for crop production’ research, has discovered that plants produce better fruit, and with a longer shelf-life and increased health-giving properties (ounce for ounce, strawberries contain more vitamin C than oranges) when they receive up to 80 per cent less water.
The fruit are not always the bringer of prosperity for supermarkets, as Tesco discovered in 2012 when it was fined £300,000 for a misleading price-promotion on its ‘half-price’ strawberries.
Generally, however, it’s all about finding new ways of marketing this hugely popular product. For example, Marks & Spencer has just started selling baby berries — ones that might otherwise slip through the net by being too small — as ‘Strawbabies’.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
