PICO Wins Prestigious (FPTT) Award

The Government of Canada has presented PICO and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's (AAFC) Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre, Summerland with a Federal Partners in Technology Transfer (FPTT) award for Excellence in Technology Transfer.  The FPTT award recognizes the successful transfer of technology from Canadian federal research organizations leading to significant public good or economic impact.  It was given to PICO and AAFC for "the successful development and transfer of a breeding program to evaluate, propagate and commercialize a range of high-quality sweet cherry varieties".

For the better part of a century, the commercial potential of sweet cherries grown in the fertile Okanagan valley of interior British Columbia was confined to a few mainstay varieties sold to local seasonal markets.  In 1994 AAFC set the release of new sweet cherry varieties on a fresh course when its Summerland facility, the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre (PARC), formed a partnership with the Okanagan Plant Improvement Corporation (PICO), an industry-led variety management company created primarily to evaluate, propagate and commercialize more than 100 novel varieites of cherry cultivars and other fruits developed in PARC's research labs and virus-free test orchards.

Over the last decade, the symbiotic AAFC/PICO relationship has enhanced the sweet cherry horticultural sector as a vital component of B.C.'s tree fruit industry, with export sales in 2007 of more than $21 million.  The AAFC breeding program provides cherry producers with self-fertile varieties that yield high-quality fruit over an extended grower season and in an assortment of growing conditions while PICO's variety commercialization expertise has transformed the way new fruit varieties are introduced and marketed.  The major shift to actively marketing sweet cherry varieties has generated more than 250 domestic and international licensing agreements and returned more than $2 million in royalties to AAFC.

The FPTT award was presented in Ottawa on June 18, 2009 at an awards ceremony held in conjunction with the Federal Partners in Technology Transfer annual conference.

The members of the team receiving the award were:

Frank Kappel, Richard MacDonald, Ann de St. Remy, Christian Fortin, Goewin Demmon (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) and John Kingsmill and Ken Haddrell (Okanagan Plant Improvement Corporation).