Spain’s AMC Group and AMC North America have announced a new joint venture with Peru’s El Pedregal to develop its proprietary grape varieties in the Andean nation.
JV Pedregal-Muñoz Farming will begin operations in 2016 with the first plantings from its Sheehan/SNFL exclusive stock in Ica, Peru.
El Pedregal has been a long-term investor in AMC Group’s breeding programme, but the joint venture marks an unprecedented partnership between grower and breeder. The Grape Genesis, AMC’s new state-of-the-art laboratory and field-testing facility in Spain, looks to stay ahead of demand and evolving consumer tastes.
Founded in 1931 as a small family business growing and packing lemons in Murcia, Spain, for the European market, AMC is now a fully integrated group of companies (still in family ownership) and a world leader in fruit, flowers and juice.
An essential and growing part of that business is the highly specialised Special New Fruit Licensing group, or SNFL, which is involved in the breeding, development and licensing of new varieties of table grapes, citrus and pomegranates.
“There was a time when consumers thought an orange was just an orange and a grape was just a grape,” Alvaro Muñoz, AMC Group chief executive officer, said in a press release. “But global production and distribution combined with better breeding programmes have raised consumer awareness over time and ‘good’ isn’t good enough.
“Consumers today are constantly chasing the next big flavour and health sensation, and that’s where we knew we could make inroads and gain traction with stellar varieties of our own and a vibrant research program that’s always in pursuit of the next big thing.”
In the 1980s AMC realised that government and institutional funding for fruit breeding programmes was rapidly disappearing and that the future of new and improved varietal development was migrating to the private sector.
It was clear that access to new varieties would soon become dependent on access to private breeding programmes. AMC teamed up with renowned California grape breeder Tim Sheehan, funding his existing program in the San Joaquin Valley.
“The main objectives of the Sheehan programme were, and still remain, to excite increasingly discerning consumers with excellent eating table grapes — seedless, full of flavour, crisp and juicy — while providing AMC and its network of growers worldwide with varieties that are more productive and require less labour and lower overall inputs,” the company said. “These new varieties must be available in red, green and black, combined with early, mid- and late-season harvest times. No small task.”
Just a few years into the partnership with Sheehan, AMC realised grape breeding was becoming a major part of its business, not just a small research and development offshoot.
SNFL was set up in 2004 to develop and license Sheehan’s new varieties worldwide through a select group of the world’s leading growers based in all the major table grape-producing countries and regions.
“Having a better product is only part of the equation,” Muñoz said. “We knew we had to have growers capable of bringing out the best in the fruit. Anything short of that would have been like building a high-performance race car and then letting just anyone drive it.”
SNFL has since licensed about 25,000 acres of the main Sheehan varieties worldwide, including over 10,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley alone.
To ensure year-round availability, SNFL has licensed some of the leading growers in Chile, Mexico, Brazil and Peru. Together, the four countries will produce some 1.5m cartons of Sheehan grapes in the coming season.
The current catalogue of some 20 varieties includes successful products like the mid-season, seedless Magenta, with an electric pink colour and refreshing cherry overtones, and the early-season green Ivory, which is crisp, juicy and sweet.
SNFL has another 100 or so Sheehan selections in the developmental pipeline, many of which will be introduced as new commercial varieties in the coming months.
At the heart of those efforts is a new, state-of-the-art laboratory and field-testing facility in Spain, The Grape Genesis. And while Sheehan died in 2009, the father-and-son team of Juan and Ivan Carreño continue his work as breeder and molecular biologist respectively.
The team utilises a vast and deep range of parental stock, collected from the world’s great grape regions, to create unique varieties that not only provide new flavour sensations but also feature health benefits consumers are seeking, like higher levels of antioxidants, and traits growers covet, like better disease resistance.
The introduction of marker-assisted breeding to the process will cut development time from origin to commercial production to five to eight years from 12 to 15 years.
The Magenta is the first variety to arrive from Peru this season, and is available now. The Timpson will be in the US after Christmas. To help market the new arrivals, AMC North America has forged partnerships with a number of US retailers.
“We want consumers to come back to retailers and specifically ask for Magenta by name, that’s the goal for all our varieties,” Muñoz said. “If you improve the product, you increase overall consumption, delight the consumer and retailer alike and can change the way Americans eat grapes, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
