Kate Evans

And that's the challenge, is even if you get a seed, a viable seed,

Getting a good, strong, healthy plant out of some of these weird, diverse crosses is very difficult.

So, you know, what I am looking for of new varieties that the consumer is going to want to eat.

So, I mean, it's got a great combination of sweetness and tartness and a nice, firm, crisp, juicy texture.

But I'm also looking for varieties that, potential varieties that work as far as the grower is concerned and the supply chain.

So one thing that is great about Sunflower is that it stores incredibly well in refrigerated storage so that as a supply chain product, it's available for a long time.

But for a consumer, that means it's a great eating experience for 12 months of the year.

and also from a grower perspective and from just a general sustainability perspective, we can get the majority of fruit from the orchard into the hands of the consumer.

In other words, there are no weird disorders or sort of susceptibility to rots and things that appear that really just kind of

mean that you have to leave fruit in the orchard because it has a problem or that fruit fails along the way in terms of reducing its quality.

The name?

Yeah.

So interestingly, for Sunflare, we did a competition within the state.

We got about 17,000 entries

Yeah, right.

One of us, like me, had an extremely large Excel spreadsheet that I seem to remember.

I sat on a plane flying from Heathrow to Seattle looking through 17,000 name entries.

The fruit itself is a yellow background apple with a pink blush.

And so it obviously made somebody think about the sun and the sunrise and all of those kind of colours.

It is suitable for our climate out here in Washington, and we are certainly a little more extreme than many other places.