In order to meet the demands of future fruit growing, we are developing new cultivars that meet the growing interest of consumers for sustainable products with high quality, good taste and attractive appearance. The new cultivars are be adapted to the regionally different and changing environmental conditions. Our breeding programs meet these complex challenges.

Our research focuses on the development of new and innovative cultivars with improved characteristics of particular importance to consumers, producers and environmentally friendly cultivation.
Our breeding programs are gearing towards the following breeding goals:

• For the Producers
  • Income level and yield stablility
  • Period to maturity
  • Pre-harvest characteristics
  • Improved storage ability and post-harvest characteristics
  • Processing and product quality

• For the Consumers
  • Fruit size, shape, firmness, colour and appearance
  • Taste, aroma, specific nutrients and texture
  • Nutritional value

• For an environmentally-friendly cultivation
  • Disease and pest resistance
  • Adaptation to environmental stress factors

We create crossbreeding populations with parents that possess desired traits for the development of future cultivars. We subject the seedlings from these cross populations to phenotypic and genotypic evaluations to select the best genotypes. We apply different methods including marker-assisted selection to make the breeding process efficient. We use the latest fruit-growing knowledge available to develop and cultivate breeding materials. Candidate cultivars are tested for their cultivation value in comparison with reference cultivars in test stations all over Germany and abroad. We also evaluate different combinations of cultivars and rootstocks. The candidates for testing are submitted based on test contracts. Variety laws protect our new cultivars. The holder of the plant variety protection is the Federal Republic of Germany, represented by the Julius Kühn Institute. If you have any questions about the use of our cultivars at home or abroad, please contact our license office, the Deutsche Saatgutgesellschaft mbH Berlin, International License Office (www.dsg-berlin.de).