Our mission is to breed apple varieties with excellent taste and growing traits, including durable resistance to significant diseases. We strive to improve their quality to a level where growing them is a joy and passion and eating their fruit is a unique experience.
Grow apples with respect to the environment
We believe that growing apple trees free from symptoms of scab (Venturia inaequalis), powdery mildew (Podosphaera leucotricha), or fire blight (Erwinia amylovora) doesn't have to be a burden for your wallet, nature, and human health. Some of our varieties require only minimal or no disease protection, which makes them a great choice (not only) for organic growing and home gardens.
Discover our diverse palette of apples
The wide range of our varieties comprises the classic dessert, the space-saving columnar, the decorative ornamental, and the red-fleshed varieties with an attractive flesh colour. Plus, we have many another interesting selections in trials.
Breeding cycle: from pollination to the consumer
We feel at home at every stage of the breeding process - from the cross-pollination at the beginning to our research, testing by our partners on their own sites, application for PVR or patents and helping the promising varieties make it on the market. We are in close contact with our partners during the whole process and together bring the best of our work to the world.
It all starts with the thorough selection of parental varieties and their crossing. Planning, isolating branches, collecting "father" flowers and then pollen, emasculating "mother" flowers, pollinating, and finally - picking the developed fruits containing pips in the autumn. Almost everyone from our team takes part in this key part of the breeding process.
Early next year, we sow seeds from the harvested fruits in our modern greenhouse with regulated temperature and humidity. Every sapling is a potential new, unique variety. Using inoculation of young seedlings with scab conidia, we can select those most resistant to scab early on.
Only the most robust selections do we graft on dwarfed rootstocks. Thanks to it, they come into bearing several years earlier than seedlings normally do, which makes the selection process much shorter. We taste and evaluate their fruit at regular intervals throughout the storage season. After a long evaluation, only a few of the best ones remain.
We offer the most promising selections to our business partners (growers, nurseries, and marketers) to test them on their own. If some variety is doing well on their site and finds a niche on the market, together we apply it for plant variety rights. After the conclusion of a licence agreement with us, the new variety can be launched on the market. The royalties earned help us in breeding tomorrow's innovative varieties.
Our most popular varieties
- club variety for professional growers
- for warm areas with drip irrigation
- grown in the USA, Europe, South Africa and Chile
- about 3.5 mil. trees planted since 2005
- firm, crisp texture, naturally non-browning flesh
- aromatic, honey-sweet flavour
'Topaz' and 'Red Topaz'
- standard scab-resistant varieties for organic cultivation
- for both professional and hobby growers
- grown especially in Europe
- average annual sales 400,000 trees in total
- very good productivity
- firm, crisp, very juicy and tasty
- grower-friendly club variety for professional growers (for intensive management)
- grown in Europe and South Africa
- 1.6 mil. trees planted since 2015
- remarkably beautiful fruit
- firm, crisp, fine texture
- finely tart flavour
Melinda® Dolcevita - 'UEB 6581'
- club variety for professionals, marketed under a joint trademark
- ca. 500,000 trees planted since 2018
- firm, crisp, juicy
- aromatic, exceptionally sweet with little acids
What does the future hold?
Developing a new variety that will succeed on the increasingly overcrowded market is a difficult task. But we don't rest on our laurels. We strive to follow the changing customers' demands as well as stay one step ahead the pathogenic fungi. The consumers' whims and pathogen adaptations make breeding an awesome challenge.
Find out more about our varieties bred so far or learn more about what we are currently working on. You might be interested in:
