Angus Soft Fruits

Angus Soft Fruits was established in 1994 in the Angus area of Scotland by three passionate growers, Lochy Porter, his father, Willie Porter, and cousin James Gray. Their vision was to sell their fruit directly to retailers and continually improve the product available to consumers.  To provide a point of difference in the products available, in the mid-1990’s an in-house research and development programme, Angus Soft Fruits Breed Programme, was set up and this is how the first AVA™ strawberry variety was developed.  

The business has since expanded through collaboration with other growers in the UK and worldwide to ensure a year-round supply of excellent berries and continual innovation, resulting in Angus Soft Fruits being a leading supplier of berries to retailers in the UK, Europe and Asia.  

Angus Soft Fruits takes pride in its team of experts, known as ‘The Berry Specialists’. They work closely with our growers worldwide to breed, grow and pack berries, ensuring that there is a year-round supply of the best-tasting fruit for their customers.  

Exclusive Interview with Lucy Wilkins, Breeding Program Director

What does a typical day look like for you?

No two days are the same as the nature of the products we sell is seasonal. In summer particularly, there is a lot of ripe fruit to monitor and record information on. Most days, we survey the plants and fruit to assess if they could be a new variety in the future. In the off season, it’s a lot of planning, planting and propagation, as well as looking at trial sites internationally, such as the large site in south of Spain where sometimes UK off season can be peak for Spain meaning busy days looking at varieties and selecting for the target market. 

Tell us more about the Angus Soft Fruits breeding program

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 health 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. 

What do you enjoy most about the industry?

It’s great to be able to taste the fruits and try to create new varieties, however, you wouldn’t believe the good and the bad that can come out of a new cross. Some of the blackberries feel like a game of Russian Roulette, a good one can be the most incredible sweet thing you’ve ever eaten, but a bad one…well, I don’t even want to go there! 

What are the biggest challenges you face in the industry? 

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. 

Can you talk us through the growing cycle, including time frames? 

Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries are quite long-term crops, growers must plan quite far in advance what they want to grow, typically they buy in a plant from a propagator. In a strawberry, what that looks like is a piece of plant that has been cut from a ‘runner’ (the vines of the plant). They then plant the ‘runner’ and it will make an exact clone of the mother plant. That takes quite a long time, so most growers are ordering plants, two years ahead. It’s a long time that they are waiting and planning to try and predict what they’re going to need in two years’ time – this is also very similar for raspberries.  

Once planted, it depends on the cropping type, but for something like a June bearer (June bearing strawberries produce one large crop of fruit each growing season, typically in June) we tend to say is a 60-day crop, so from planting to fruit it’s 60 days. You then get a nice big plot of fruit that we can sell and those can start anywhere as early as April and hopefully continue all the way through to the autumn. We get quite a good long British season here in the UK and places like Scotland are instrumental in that as they have a fantastic growing climate up there. The long days mean the fruit can ripen over a long period of time, so we get really good quality fruit coming out of our Scottish farms. 

Innovation and future plans?

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. 

What do you look for in the best berries?

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.