The UK is not self-sufficient in apples, even during the cropping season, providing only one third of our own consumption with the shortfall made up by imports. A large proportion of this is due to our inability to meet the stringent specification set by supermarkets for Class 1 fruit, which represents 80% of sales. Our consortium represents 20% of the apple crop in the UK; our records show that similar orchards can have outputs that vary by a factor of 2 or 3, with reject fruit going to waste or low value processing. A significant amount of this variation is down to management practice. Our distribution members believe that, by standardising best-practice orchard management, and with a strategic approach to breeding new cultivars, we could gear up our orchards to take back at least 100,000T of the imported volume. This project is designed to enhance the pace of improvement of quality and output parameters in UK apple orchards through improving management practices and strategic data capture. For this, we need detailed management information, which has been sorely lacking due to the labour-intensive and subjective nature of manual checks to date. The project develops a novel vision-based crop measurement technology based on the convergence between state-of-the-art cost effective image capture technology (now achievable using consumer grade cameras instead of expensive scientific instruments) and our new image processing algorithms. These tools will be used to identify and record commercially relevant phenotype traits in detail. This data can be used for yield and quality prediction and management in season, for the optimisation of commercial yields across the UK through the transfer of 'best practice' over a longer timescale, and finally to tie in with the recently completed sequencing of the apple genome, to identify the best markers to more effectively breed new elite cultivars with the best commercial (as well as biological) traits. The project objectives include the identification and optimisation of the most commercially effective traits, the development of an automated in-field system to regularly measure the status and development of these traits in response to stress and management activities, decision support outputs and the new knowledge required to start the UK strategic development programme for new types of commercial cultivar. The consortium is led by business, in the form of Worldwide Fruit, the UK's largest apple producer and supply group, joined by technology developers who will commercialise the novel platform technology, and supported by East Malling Research, world experts in pomology and apple cultivar development, who will set out the phenotype maps and disseminate the academic outputs relating to genetic markers for improved cultivars. The group has the skills to research, develop, commercialise and exploit the technology in the UK, and will exploit within Europe and/or licence to other manufacturers as volumes grow. TSB support is the catalyst needed to drive this innovation across the business-academia gap, while the exposure the scheme brings will help us to penetrate the market more quickly. Potential benefits to the UK apple growers' industry are: raising production quality (percentage within spec.) to better meet supermarket size and uniformity specifications, saving up to £40M of wasted product; increasing the UK average cropping intensity by up to 50% through 'best practice' identification and transfer, growing capacity by a further £50M; and giving the UK the capability to strategically lead the world in the rapid development of new cultivars, shortening the introduction time by potentially up to 5 years