Pear Breeding Objectives

The Plant & Food Research breeding team are specifically selecting for:

• Ready-to-eat fruit with crisp texture
• Good appearance/red skin colour wherever possible
• Extended storage and shelf life
• A range of flavours (e.g. pear flavour, pear tropical flavour, nutty, aniseed, plum)
• Disease resistance
  

The Opportunity for Novel Pears

Pears often compete with apples for shelf-space and there has been a comparative lack of pear variety innovation. Dealers are looking for new products to interest consumers.

Plant & Food Research commenced the pear breeding programme in 1983 with exciting progress to date.

European pears are soft and difficult to handle. Whilst they have beautiful flavour and wonderful texture they are loosing their market share. They do not offer consumer convenience; consumers have to wait until they ripen. Generally they take a long time to come into production.

Asian pears by contrast are crisp and juicy and can be handled easily but they do not have the same flavour and aroma as European pears. Trees are earlier maturing and some are more resistant to fireblight. So HortResearch crossed European and Asian pear varieties to produce some outstanding new highly coloured varieties that have the crispness, keeping quality and the ready-to-eat characteristics of the Asian types with the flavours and aroma of the European types.

These new pears can be stored for quite a long time and have interesting new flavours such as tropical fruit flavours.

Initial market research has been done and Prevar™ is confident that these new varieties will attract market interest. Valuable niche markets will be developed and the pears are expected to become popular.