First joining Sainsbury's in 1993 as a student, Peter Batt, category manager for fresh produce, is Sainsbury's through and through, working his way up from the retailer's graduate scheme before becoming category manager for fresh produce in March 2012.

With a commitment to source more home-grown produce and to invest in R&D for British growers and producers in line with Sainsbury's 2020 commitments, FPJ spoke to Batt to ask about the retailer's current and future plans for the fresh produce aisle.

What are your hopes for Sainsbury's fruit and vegetable output in 2013?

We are looking at trialling produce in the UK that customers wouldn't expect and to extend seasons where possible, while making sure that we continue to meet customer expectations and do not compromise on flavour, taste and freshness. We are also looking at offering our customers more British-produced fruit and vegetables by making more efficient use of our land, water and agrichemical and energy inputs with less waste and minimal impact on the environment.

Tell us about some of the new varieties and offerings you are looking to bring to market this year.

We have a rolling varietal programme where we introduce a number of new varieties across the category each year. Later this year we will be introducing an exciting new variety of strawberry into our by Sainsbury's brand that performed excellently with customers.

As well as new varieties we also look to preserve older and less common varieties. The top-fruit category is a great example of this, where we offer our customers the choice of 64 different British-grown apple and pear varieties. The less common varieties are sold in our best of British apple caterpillar pack, which really stands out.

It emerged recently that Sainsbury's was trialling both banana hammocks and produce bins, giving customers the power to bin poor-quality fruit and veg. Can you see both of these ever ending up nationwide?

We're trialling banana hammocks at the moment to see if we can offer customers discernibly better quality in our stores and showcase our Fairtrade bananas. It's too early to tell whether we would take these further but it's initially been very popular with strong customer feedback. The produce bins are also still under trial as part of the same wider initiative to ensure that the quality of the fruit and vegetables we have on shelf is the best, and is in addition to more quality checks being carried out by our colleagues.

We have worked on shelf-edge labelling of apples and pears and our shelf-edge labels now give the customer more ideas about how best to use the specific variety. Independent figures released by English Apples & Pears for the week ending 29 December – where Sainsbury's performance of apple varieties other than the more commonly grown such as Royal Gala, Cox and Braeburn - is market-leading at 29.1 per cent compared with Tesco's 25.1 per cent – confirmed that Sainsbury's British apple and pear sales remained buoyant. This performance demonstrates that our British top-fruit offer delivers in respect to both quality and value for our customers.

DEFRA secretary Owen Paterson has urged British growers to support GM crops. What are your views on this, and could you ever see consumers embracing GM fruit and veg?

While the latest scientific research and current government advice is that GM ingredients do not present any risks to human health, we acknowledge the concerns of our customers and do not permit the use of GM crops in any of Sainsbury's products. We'll always work closely with our suppliers to ensure that our GM policy is adhered to. For example, we require soya or maize used in our products to come from suppliers who are able to trace back through every step of the food chain to ensure that the non-GM nature of the product has not been compromised.

Mark Price of Waitrose has said the heavy rainfall in 2013 will result in price rises for fresh produce and predicted that apple prices will go up due to a reduced crop. How will Sainsbury's deal with any possible inflation?

We are supporting British farmers and growers and have been working closely with them to ensure we keep prices as low as possible for our customers, while ensuring great quality, and making the most of the British crop.

Sainsbury's top-fruit technologist Dr Theresa Huxley (pictured above)invested a lot of time visiting Sainsbury's core growers pre-harvest to understand the impact of the weather on the availability and quality of their crops. This clear understanding of the crop allowed her to make sound decisions based on fact.

Our by Sainsbury's and Basics products lend themselves to crop utilisation, and the crop produced this last season included very ugly fruits – 'no lookers, great eaters' – which were perfect for the Basics apple bag and great value for our customer. We have no issues lowering our specifications to aide growers.

Several significant R&D grants were awarded to fresh produce businesses at the recent Sainsbury's Farming Conference. Can you talk us through how producers are exciting you in this field and how important R&D is for growers.

Our announcement and subsequent award of our agricultural R&D grants is directly linked to achieving the goals of our 2020 targets. The objective of these grants was to enable our produce development group growers to research unique and innovative solutions to both existing issues and identify and develop techniques and systems to enable sustainable intensification.

We awarded grants across a wide variety of sectors, with the common objective of supporting our British growers while enabling sustainable growth. I am particularly excited about the grants which were awarded to fresh produce suppliers, since these will really allow the produce category to step on with respect to delivering our customers better-quality fresh produce, which tastes better and lasts longer, while proactively reducing waste in both our supply chain and for our customers.

In what ways will you be making sure Sainsbury's meets its 2020 targets for British-sourced fruit and vegetables? Is it a case of getting creative? How are you working with British growers to ensure you are less reliant on imports?

We're looking at trialling produce in the UK that customers wouldn't expect, extending seasons where possible, researching new growing techniques and getting higher yields from our land sustainably.

We are looking to maximise the amount of British produce we sell but we will not compromise on taste and quality. Our investment in research and development will help us to reduce our reliance on imports. —