The key to the ongoing success of any business is innovation and new technology. Over the last decade, the soft fruit industry has had notable success increasing marketable yield and quality across all major small fruit crops, largely through the adoption of new growing systems that offer production efficiencies.

A key challenge for the future is maintaining incremental improvements in production efficiency in the face of increasing labour costs and reduced availability of plant protection products. The industry is now looking to new forms of smart breeding to provide varieties that require lower labour inputs and less reliance on plant protection products.

For this reason, Berryplants partners with several breeding programmes to provide the bedrock of new cultivar development. 

Breeding programmes can only tell part of the story. Before any new variety is recommended to our growers, we put it through extensive on farm trials across all the major UK growing regions, testing performance under real commercial growing conditions rather than relying on breeder data alone.

[Trials Manager name and title], oversees this programme, managing trial sites, recording results, and feeding findings back to our breeding partners to help shape the next generation of varieties.

These trials assess everything that matters to a working grower, yield, fruit quality, disease resistance, and how a variety performs across different soil types, climates, and production systems.

It's this independent, hands on testing that gives us the confidence to recommend a variety to our customers, and the insight to advise growers on which selections will suit their specific site.