HortResearch is a world-class fruit science company. They use New Zealand’s unique resources in fruit, plants and environmentally sustainable production systems to produce innovative fruit and food products.

HortResearch’s areas of research include:

• Fruit Breeding (breeding new fruits with consumer driven attributes)
• Optimising fruit production (development of new cultivars of kiwifruit, apple pear, stonefruit and berries)
• Sustainable land use (developing sustainable strategies for efficient irrigation, plant nutrition and agrichemical management).
• Postharvest science (evaluating fruit storage, shipping and ripening)
• Applied pathology (plant disease and fungicide use)
• Applied entomology (new solutions to management of insect pests)
• Biosecurity (protection of from new organisms, including insect and plant pathogens)
• Plant genomics (describing unique profile of RNA, proteins and compounds in crops)
• Insect science (gene function in model pest insects and their pathogens and research on the environmental impacts of innovative agri-technologies, including genetically modified organisms)
• Functional foods (researching how fruit and vegetable benefits can be incorporated in functional foods, see our focus story on Nutrigenomics).
• Sensory and consumer science (evaluating flavour, texture and taste, and predicting future global consumer, market and technology trends).
• Human health and performance (impacts of nutrition and functional foods on sports performance and health).
• Industrial biotechnology (researching functional proteins: proteins that produce flavour and fragrance compounds, metabolise carbohydrates and polysaccharides, or can cause allergenic responses in humans)
• Biosensors (developing small devices that can be used to measure the concentration of chemical compounds).