Our cultivars are grown in more than 30 countries worldwide.

We’ve got a long track record of breeding delicious new cultivars that consumers and producers love – from sensational kiwifruit and apple superstars to world-renowned hops.
Our breeding programmes screen thousands of potential winners every year. Each seedling undergoes rigorous testing to find the one that makes it to market. It needs to tick all the boxes for producers – it has to grow well, without the need for excessive water and fertiliser, produce good yields, and have the ability to ward off common pests and diseases. Produce from our cultivars needs to be able to be stored and shipped around the world in pristine condition. And consumers need to love everything about it – so each one needs to look perfect and taste great.

For more than sixty years, we’ve been building up a library of plants with huge diversity from which we can choose our breeding parents. We know which ones always produce exceptional offspring, and those that can surprise us. We use knowledge from our genetics and genomics research to be able to screen offspring to find those with promise before they reach full size, which allows us to concentrate our efforts on the ones we think will excel.