Strawberries hold a special allure to the British; they evoke a hoped-for sunny summer and visions of picnics, piled high pavlovas and cute little dishes of Eton mess, not to mention the thrill of a frosted glass of Pimm’s or a strawberry daiquiri. Their seasonal appearance once coincided with the start of Wimbledon; strawberries and cream have been served there since the first tournament in 1877.
The Wimbledon effect
During Wimbledon fortnight, British shoppers buy roughly 9,500 tonnes (about 19 million punnets) of strawberries, accounting for about 15% of the entire summer season’s berry sales. At supermarkets like Waitrose, strawberry sales can rocket by 140% to over 400% in a single week.
Because strawberries cannot be stored or frozen without destroying their texture, supermarkets cannot simply stockpile them in warehouses ahead of peak demand. Relying on farm relationships and specialised demand-planning software, they can adjust ordering volumes day by day. If the forecast predicts a sunny Wimbledon weekend, supermarkets will automatically scale up their daily strawberry orders from farms by 30% to 50%. If it rains, demand drops sharply. Retail buyers actively track the tournament bracket. Historically, when a high-profile British or favourite tennis player progresses to the quarter- or semi-finals, supermarket strawberry sales experience an extra 20% surge on the days they play. Logistics teams actively look at the match schedule to push extra stock to stores the night before a big match.
The impact of a heatwave
Because supermarkets need millions more punnets than usual, they work hand-in-hand with commercial growers to manage the natural ‘flushes’ (when a massive wave of fruit ripens all at once due to a sudden heatwave). If a pre-Wimbledon heatwave (we’re having one right now) causes strawberries to ripen faster than planned, supermarkets will quickly step in to buy up the surplus. For example, Tesco frequently buys up hundreds of tonnes of unexpected ‘bumper crops’ right before the tournament, repackaging them into larger 1 kg plastic boxes at a discount to prevent farm waste and feed the Wimbledon rush.
An unpredictable cold snap or heatwave creating a national strawberry shortage during the tournament means that supply chain models pivot to prioritisation. Long-term supermarket contract growers will prioritise their committed supermarket clients over the open wholesale market to ensure grocery shelves stay full. Take a look around your local supermarket in the next few days, there’ll be some offers you can’t refuse! Sainsbury's have just started a 3 for 2 offer on berries for Nectar members until 14 July.
A strawberry is rarely bought alone during Wimbledon season. Supermarket supply chains treat strawberries, clotted cream, single cream and Pimm’s as a singular unit on sale; that’s why you see them grouped together. Dairy logistics are scaled up in synchronicity with the strawberry harvest.
Wimbledon itself relies on a hyper-local, isolated supply chain. All of the official strawberries eaten on-court – about 34 tonnes – are grown just 30 miles away at Hugh Lowe Farms in Kent. Pickers start at 5:00 AM every morning so the berries can be driven directly to the court and eaten by spectators the same day. Hugh Lowe Farms supplies supermarkets, too; look out for the name of the farm owner, Marion Regan. They won’t be quite as freshly picked, but if you can’t get to Wimbledon, it’s the closest way to taste the fruit sold there.
The challenge of suppling the perfect berry
We don’t even grow strawberries in the same way now. A small percentage continue to be soil-grown, you’ll see them at PYO farms. The majority, well in the UK they don’t go near the ground. Tabletop growing, where the plants are on trestles or similar structure that are easily accessible to pickers (and hard to get to for pests) account for over 85% of the strawberries grown in the UK and Ireland. The picking accessibility must help enormously, as harvesting ground grown anything is backbreaking work.
Strawberries should have a sweet aroma that’s echoed in the taste, in a gently yielding bite that’s juicy and fragrant. The modern strawberry is a result of supermarket supply chains that need fruit to look good on the shelf. Commercial berries must survive exacting temperature-controlled logistics; they are born to be tough little fruit.
An heirloom, organic or wild strawberry is ripe all the way through, incredibly sweet, and completely soft. If you put a pallet of these on a bumpy English road (or a truck from Spain), they’d likely be jam on arrival. To fix this, agricultural breeders selected varieties with a dense, more fibrous central core. This acts like a structural column or a built-in shock absorber. It keeps the strawberry rigid during packing and shipping.
Strawberries ripen from the outside in, triggered by sunlight and warmth. The skin and outer flesh turn deep red first because they are exposed to the sun and produce anthocyanins (the pigments that make berries red). However, there are some varieties that are naturally a pale red, even white, so don’t always judge a strawberry by its colour. The core is the very last part of the strawberry to mature, develop sugars and turn red.
Commercial growers often harvest the berries the exact moment the outside turns completely red, even if the inner core hasn’t caught up yet, shelf life is important to supermarkets. Strawberries are blasted to 2°C within a couple of hours of being picked. Once their temperature drops, the chemical ripening process completely halts. If the core was white and hard when it was picked on the farm, it will stay as it is all the way to your kitchen table. If you find berries marketed as ‘the best’ or ‘finest’ or superior in some sense, the chances are they might have been picked later and, therefore, will be riper throughout.
How strawberries are picked for Wimbledon demand
During the British summer, the goal for supermarkets is to get a strawberry from field to shelf in 24 to 36 hours. In the UK, pickers start early when the morning air is cool. Strawberries are hand-picked directly into their retail punnets, within one to two hours they are moved to the farm’s on-site cold store to drop their ‘field heat’ down to about 10°C. The punnets then go through a forced-air blast chiller, rapidly dropping the fruit’s core temperature to 2°C. Refrigerated trucks (maintained strictly between 0°C and 2°C) pick up the pallets from the farm and drive them to the supermarket’s Regional Distribution Centres where they are cross-docked (unloaded and immediately sorted onto store-specific delivery trucks) without ever leaving the chilled environment. Trucks depart on overnight routes to local supermarkets and arrive 24-36 hours after picking. Fresh, though a little cold.
We also rely heavily on farms in places outside the UK, such as Huelva, in Spain. Because of the more than 1,000-mile distance, the timeline stretches to three to four days, relying on a highly optimised continuous cold chain and non-stop travel through Spain and France.
Getting strawberries to you is an extraordinary feat, whether they taste as good is another matter. Always eat your strawberries at room temperature, they’ll smell and taste much better, ideally give them a little blast of warming sunshine. And spare a thought for all the work that's gone in to getting the strawberry to you...
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