Haskap berry Canada’s new super food
Bob Bors used to be a strawberry guy, whose area of interest was an obscure variety of the luscious red fruit with no real commercial potential.
When Bors talked about his strawberry, as academics do, he would watch his listeners, be they students or colleagues or friends, nodding off while the words of his mentor echoed through his head.
“My mentor had been a strawberry breeder, too, but then he became a raspberry breeder,” says Bors, the head of the fruit program at the University of Saskatchewan. “The motto he always repeated to me was, ‘Why be one of the world’s 100 best strawberry breeders when I could be one of the top 10 raspberry breeders.’”
Those words stuck with Bors, and he carried them with him to the Prairies, along with a sense that his career should be about something greater than an obscure strawberry.
“I was looking for something,” he says.
He was looking to crack into the top 10. Then, one day, there it was in the university’s nursery, alongside the sea buckthorn and Nanking cherries. Only it wasn’t a raspberry, but a “funny little crop that nobody had ever heard of.”
It is called haskap. And you may not have heard of it either. I know I hadn’t. But it is Canada’s newest super food. A hardy, anti-oxidant rich, cold-weather-loving berry — with Russian, Japanese and Canadian roots — that has researchers buzzing about its health-boosting potential.
The Japanese refer to haskap as the “fruit of longevity.” Farmers refer to it as a berry gold mine waiting to be developed, a cash crop that could catapult the haskap to the top of the Canadian berry heap, alongside the almighty blueberry.
“It is the perfect berry,” says Axel Hvidberg, a grower in Salmon Arm, B.C. “Haskap is tasty. It thrives in the cold. Rank it up there with beaver tails on the Rideau Canal in winter as an iconic Canadian treat — that is where I think haskap is going.”
Hvidberg describes Bob Bors as the “father of haskap in Canada.” But he is more like a grandson. Haskap has been around for decades as an ornamental bush as well as existing in the Canadian wilds. It grows beside wetlands where only the foolhardy, such as Bors, dare to tread during blackfly season in June when the berries ripen.
“Nursery men nicknamed haskap ornamentals — sweet berry honeysuckles — but that was a total lie,” Bors says, laughing. “They tasted awful.”
Older Russian varieties of haskap tasted like tonic water. Fine for the Russians, since they mixed the juice with vodka.
Bors’ big idea was to crossbreed a newer northern Russian strain of haskap with a northern Japanese variety. The mix produced a fruit that looks like a blueberry, only longer and fatter. The payoff was its great taste. Imagine a grape/raspberry/ blueberry or a raspberry/ blueberry/black-currant all mashed together, with a zingy finish, and you are on the right track.
Haskap ripens before blueberries. Meaning farmers can grow and harvest haskap and blueberries, without one cash crop simply replacing the other. Haskap also craves cold, eliminating the prospect of California mega-farms adopting it as their own.
“We’re not going to see any big haskap plantations down in the States,” says Hvidberg.
What makes a super food a super food is its environment. Haskap can withstand temperatures of - 47 C, high exposure to highlatitude ultraviolet rays and thrives in soggy, oxygen-deprived soils. In a word, it is one tough berry and especially healthy for humans because it is particularly high in cancer-fighting antioxidants.
Vasantha Rupasinghe, an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, compared the total anti-oxidant content of haskap with blackberry, blueberry, partridgeberry, strawberry, raspberry and red table grape.
“We found haskap was by far the top in terms of total anti-oxidants per portion,” he says. “It has two to three times more anti-oxidants than blueberries. It is the better berry.”
Rupasinghe’s lab works closely with Haskapa, a grower and maker of haskap products — juices, jams, dried and frozen berries — based in Mahone Bay, N.S. The company was originally a sustainable forestry startup, but its forests around Lunenburg County were immature, so the owners experimented with crops.
“We tried growing hops, we tried Arctic kiwi,” says Liam Tayler, Haskapa’s commercial director. “Then we came across haskap (they got plants from Bors’ university nursery in 2011).
“Despite the weed competition, it flourished.”
Haskapa now has 30 acres of haskap under cultivation and plans to plant 200 more. Sobeys stores in Nova Scotia stock its products, including a juice I sampled last week — my first taste of haskap — that sells for about $15 a bottle.
The verdict? I tasted raspberries and subtle hints of blueberry, and enjoyed a drink with a delightfully tangy finish, though I am not convinced I would pay $15 for 500 millilitres. (It was a gift from my editor.)
What is holding haskap back, its boosters say, is patience. Farmers who plant haskap today must wait six years for their crop to fully mature. So even if there is growing demand, there remains a dearth of berries, keeping prices at a level where the average consumer might balk.
But Tayler remains unbowed.
“I don’t see it as unrealistic for haskap to become a $500-million a year business in Atlantic Canada in the next five years,” he says. “The limiting factor at this point is berry supply.”
(For comparison: blueberries are a $360-million a year export business for Canadian farmers, tops among fruit crops.)
Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil is visiting Haskapa’s new retail store in Mahone Bay this week, an indication, perhaps, of the province’s enthusiasm for the budding industry.
Meanwhile Bors is working on the haskap supply problem for farmers while perfecting new varieties — Tundra, Borealis, Aurora — to name a few.