Taste of success as heritage apple juice flies off the shelves
The Co-operative is toasting the success of its new heritage apple juice, made from rare and previously endangered apple varieties, after the drink sold out within weeks of first going on sale.
Ten thousand one-litre bottles of the Truly Irresistible Tillington 1,000 pressed apple juice were available in selected Co-operative food stores, each one made with juice from historic apples that might otherwise have been consigned to history.
The apples were threatened with extinction before The
Co-operative Farms, part of The Co-operative Group, bought them from the National Fruit Collection in 2008, planting the trees at its farm at Tillington, near Hereford, with a determination to put them to a commercial use.
The resulting Tillington 1,000 apple juice has been very popular, and was voted top in an apple juice “taste test” for the Market Kitchen programme broadcast on the UKTV Good Food channel.
“It has been a phenomenal success,” said The Co-operative Farms Managing Director Christine Tacon. “The first harvest from newly-planted trees is always small, but the number of apples will increase rapidly over the first few years so we will have more bottles on the shelves next winter.
“I’m sure there are many people who enjoyed the drink this year, and will look forward to it returning to Co-operative food stores. With each year’s harvest we will get more apples, and so more bottles of juice, but it will never be a mass-produced product.
“It is important to us that the juice is a way of preserving British apple varieties that had fallen out of fashion and were in danger of disappearing.”
Among apple varieties included in the Tillington 1,000 is “Isaac Newton’s Tree”, identical to and originating from the apple tree which, legend has it, inspired Sir Isaac Newton to discover gravity.
Other varieties include many dating back to pre-Victorian times, many regional varieties with colourful histories, and even one named, by a fan, after the singer Gene Pitney.