A new homegrown strawberry is ousting foreign competition to become the taste of the British summer. The Malling Centenary has been developed by researchers in Kent over the past eight years, with fans claiming that it has a richer, deeper flavour than its Dutch rival, the Elsanta.

This year the Malling Centenary has become widely available in British supermarkets for the first time, in the front line of the retailers’ attempts to sell summer freshness.

While Elsanta is prized by growers for its high yields and by supermarkets for its ability to survive long journeys from farm to shelf intact, its flavour has not always been to everyone’s taste. The breed has variously been described by food writers and strawberry connoisseurs as “dull”, “boring”, “tasteless” and “like sweet turnips”.

Supermarkets and strawberry breeders have been breeding new varieties for years in an attempt to bring back more flavour to the May-June crop.

Malling Centenary is also capable of surviving picking and packing, but the breeders at East Malling Research in Kent claim to have created a strawberry with more flavour, whatever the weather.

“I think within a year or two you won’t see Elsanta or Sonata any more,” Laurence Olins, the chairman of British Summer Fruits, the industry body representing British berry growers, said.

“Elsanta has been there for years – it has been the mainstay. Sonata has been around for about five years and was seen as better and more reliable than Elsanta, but equally it’s not as sweet and not as big as Malling Centenary.”

Sainsbury’s agrees. Maddie Wilson, the category technical manager for fruit, said: “Elsanta is pretty much the backbone of the strawberry industry. Ninety per cent of the industry rely on Elsanta, but we’re seeing a shift, with Malling Centenary replacing it.

“It will take a number of years. We are talking three or four years away when we’ll see Elsanta becoming very small in the grower base.”

To most shoppers, there appears to be little difference between one punnet of strawberries and another. But to breeders, a successful commercial variety is the result of a decade of painstaking work. The basics of strawberry breeding have not changed since Louis XV’s botanist Antoine Duchesne spotted that it was possible to cross-pollinate different strawberry plants, inadvertently sparking a horticultural revolution. Strawberry breeders use the old-fashioned method of mixing pollen from one plant to another using brushes, carefully recording which varieties are mixed. When the strawberries grow, the breeders and their customers, the supermarkets, judge which of these new varieties might work.

“It’s a numbers game,” says Peter Vinson, a strawberry breeder from Faversham in Kent who transformed his hobby into a major business enterprise in the 1980s.

“We produce tens of thousands of seedlings which are then selected over a number of years before we get something commercial. Our average success rate is one commercial variety from 60,000 seedlings.”

It takes about seven years to go from a promising seedling to a commercial variety, Vinson said. His latest is Crimson Blush, a variety that is also packed with flavour.

“There have been many varieties released but no winners. Lots of also-rans do not get taken up by commerce. The only challengers have been Sonata and Malling Centenary.”

Maddie Wilson said Sainsbury’s was convinced that Malling Centenary was a winner when the supermarket chain first started selling it in small volumes two years ago, but growers needed to be persuaded to take the risk to change varieties.

Larger fruits are more profitable because pickers can fill a 200g punnet more quickly, an important consideration since the entire strawberry-growing process is done by hand, from planting to picking to packing.

“You can almost guarantee when you’re doing a sampling with your growers that the strawberry that tastes the most delicious will the lowest yielding.

“The holy grail is finding something that is a grower’s dream: easy to plant, yields well, performs well in different weather and gets the right size of fruit, the plants last a long time, taste delicious and look lovely,” said Wilson.

In the past 10 years, strawberry sales have leaped from £300m a year to more than £1.2bn, with nearly 70,000 tonnes of fruit shipped to supermarkets.

“What’s been driving it is that we’re now the biggest fruit category bar none,” Olins said. “Berries represent 22%of the fruit category. Ten years ago, it was about 5%.”

A major factor has been that summer fruits are no longer sold just as a dessert or culinary item, but in snack packs.

It’s not just strawberries – blackberries are as increasingly being sold as snacking fruit rather than for cooking, thanks to a larger, sweeter version called Victoria. Raspberries are undergoing a similar transformation, with Sapphire and Berry Jewel – a very large variety that Vinson worked on for 12 years – now available.

For all that Malling Centenary and other new varieties are improving the taste, there is little that growers can do about the British weather, with June being one of the wettest ever recorded. Although strawberries are grown in polytunnels, the atmosphere and temperature still have an effect.

“The cool nights are helping flavour, but what we’re lacking is light and warmth,” Olins said.

“This year there’s so much water – within the polytunnels there’s 100% humidity which is very difficult to control.”