A battle has broken out between Harrods and Tesco over the sale of rare Spanish cherries.

The high-end Knightsbridge department store and “Britain’s biggest discounter” are selling Glamour cherries at vastly different retails.

The only cherry currently available in the UK, Glamour is on sale for £225 a kilo at Harrods, representing a cost of around £3 a fruit, while Tesco is selling the stonefruit for £3.99 a punnet.

Glamour cherries are grown on a single farm in north-east Spain and are the only fresh cherries available in the world in early April. Tesco said it had bought the exclusive UK rights to sell the cherries from Spanish farmer Oscar Ortiz.

But Harrods defended its product, saying it was sourced from Paris and had been on sale for a number of weeks. A spokesperson for Harrods told freshinfo that the large price tag was normal for the fruit, which it has stocked for the last five years.”

Matthias Kiehm, general manager of catering and entertainment at Harrods, said: “While we appreciate they are on sale at a high price compared with in-season cherries, for a select group of discerning clients they are a delicacy worth paying for.”

Tesco stonefruit buyer Andrew Lewis told The Telegraph that the supermarket aims to be the UK’s number-one shop for cherries and is therefore selling them at a “ridiculously low price”. Tesco’s cherries went on sale in 250 UK stores on Monday.

Ortiz grows the Brooks, Coral Champagne and Chelan sweet cherry tree varieties, which are picked daily in a heated greenhouse, and he is even said to sleep among his trees to monitor the air temperature and humidity hourly.

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