Dr Jodi Neal began her career as a plant breeder through her PhD in a macadamia nut breeding program, where her primary investigation was looking into the conservation of wild macadamias. While her work was centred on macadamia conservation, she studied it as a resource for breeding, which is where her passion for plant breeding was ignited.
"I had the opportunity to work as a macadamia breeder with the Queensland Government, and then a few years later, the opportunity arose to move across to strawberries," said Dr Neal.
As a breeding opportunity, working with strawberries provides a high level of satisfaction, given its nature as a short-term crop. Dr Neal can see and make a significant impact faster than she would for macadamia, which takes approximately 20 years to produce a new variety.
"It's fantastic to create something that has an on-the-ground impact on our farmers."
Now the principal plant breeder and team leader of the Strawberry Production Systems unit at the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries Queensland, Dr Neal has played an integral role in introducing pink and white strawberry varieties in Australia.
Primarily, her team's work is centred around red strawberries, the leading berry grown, and the team routinely develops new varieties of red strawberries. However, introducing pink and white strawberries has come to fruition through a desire to create diversity within the market and for consumers to have a visual indicator of differing strawberry varieties. There are over ten red strawberry varieties with unique flavour profiles grown around Australia each year. However, the logistics of growers being able to label these different varieties isn't feasible, as many will have multiple varieties moving through packing sheds daily. This also explains why consumers often have differing and inconsistent flavour experiences when buying strawberries, where no two pallets are alike.
Hence, the motivation behind Dr Neal's pursuits in cultivating white and pink varieties. Dr Neal's team contacted a seed bank in the US (USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository) to access seeds from a naturally white strawberry species from Chile. However, this wild white strawberry is small and soft and not commercially viable as a new variety for Australian growers.
Dr Neal crossed this naturally white species with regular red strawberries and continued with the berry's offspring. This has meant that over multiple generations, she has created pink and white varieties that are bigger and firmer, maintaining that grandparent's unique colour and unique and compelling flavour. Simultaneously, these new generation pink and white strawberries, very importantly, have all the attributes of berry that farmers need to make them growable, transportable, maintain a good shelf life and look great for consumers.
"There's no genetic modification. We've used old-fashioned plant breeding techniques of cross-pollination: taking pollen from one flower to another, germinating the seeds and picking the best of them."
The pink and white varieties are grown identically to red strawberries, with a slightly smaller yield. Dr Neal's primary focus has been on ensuring the taste and quality of the experience consumers have when trying the varieties are perfect.
"If you've got something that looks different, you want to make sure that consumers have an amazing experience that first time, so we've focused heavily on flavour, appearance, and shelf-life."
The white and pink varieties have starkly different flavour profiles to red strawberries, where there can often be tart, bitter, or sour. The white and pink varieties more accurately resemble what the strawberry used to taste like, the white wild grandparent of the strawberry variety ensuring a sweet and tropical flavour, like that of a pineapple.
"The scientific name of strawberries contains the word ananassa, which means pineapple. That's how they used to taste, so the white and pink strawberries are really an old-fashioned strawberry flavour brought back rather than a new flavour creation."
The presence of the wild white grandparent strawberry also means that the pink and white varieties have a higher disease resistance than their red counterparts, requiring fewer sprays. Their shelf-life's longevity makes them less likely to be wasted.
Dr Neal is currently in the final stages of commercialising the white and pink varieties. The berry has had a high success rate for enjoyment from both growers and across independently conducted consumer panels. The plant material is being distributed to nurseries that have started bulking up numbers of the varieties so that they can be distributed to farmers as soon as possible.
Red strawberries will likely continue to be the most sought-after strawberry, with white and pink varieties posing as a specialty and gourmet variety and experience, with the varieties having great potential to expand globally.
Read more about White Strawberries in the latest issue below.
