Marks & Spencer is urging growers to adopt new techniques, which it hopes will eventually provide its customers with a totally seedless citrus offer.
The retailer will have seedless clemenules in store for the first time this Christmas, and is cherry picking growers around the world to trial production of seedless lemons, mandarins and grapefruit.
M&S’s technical manager Andrew Sharp told the Journal: “The statement we are making is that we eventually want to get to a seedless position on all citrus. Seeds serve no purpose in fruit other than to annoy our customers.”
“We have been working towards this quietly for some time. We have done it with Navels, the only oranges we stock, and we have managed it with satsumas, by picking the right regions to source from. Now we have got seedless clementines and we have more exciting developments in the pipeline.”
He said that the clemenule advance, which is new to M&S but not the industry, had been achieved by segregation and isolation of orchards, taking cross-pollination out of the equation to as great an extent as possible and removing elements that lead to seeds appearing in fruit.
The same methodology has been applied to produce commercial volumes of seedless lemons and Sharp said: “With mandarins, we will have to look at breeding, and with grapefruit it is perhaps less important as consumers tend to cut them open. But both are on our radar and, while we have made a real step forward already, this is by no means the end.”
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