The company that makes Ribena is investing £200,000 to help British blackcurrant farmers protect their crops after extreme weather damaged the 2026 harvest. Suntory Beverage & Food announced on July 17 that it is working with two groups — the Blackcurrant Foundation, which represents growers, and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (Niab), a farming research centre. The money will pay for practical steps to help blackcurrant bushes cope with unpredictable weather, from heavy rain to heatwaves (The Guardian).

The 2026 UK blackcurrant harvest is expected to reach about 9,000 tonnes. That is roughly 10% below the usual average of 10,000 tonnes. Farmers across East Anglia, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Kent, and Scotland were hit by one weather problem after another. First, one of the wettest winters on record soaked their fields. Then spring frosts and hail damaged the plants. Finally, heatwaves in June and July scorched the berries and caused some to fall off the bushes early.

Harriet Prosser, a crop and soil specialist at Suntory, and Jo Hilditch, who chairs the Blackcurrant Foundation and grows blackcurrants herself in Herefordshire, are leading the project. They are working with researchers at Niab to improve soil health and make crops more resilient — meaning better able to bounce back from difficult conditions.

The £200,000 investment is separate from a bigger, longer-term programme. Suntory has already committed £920,000 over five years to the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, which breeds new varieties of blackcurrant specially designed for Ribena. That partnership has been running for more than 30 years. The goal is to create plants that can survive extreme weather, pests, and diseases while keeping the familiar Ribena taste. In 2020, Suntory invested £500,000 to keep the partnership going (Beverage Daily, BusinessGreen).

Here is what makes this matter: 95% of all blackcurrants grown in the UK go into Ribena. So when the harvest suffers, it is not just a farming problem — it is a direct problem for the brand.

Farmers have also been working with Suntory to develop new blackcurrant varieties that do not need long stretches of cold winter weather to produce fruit. That matters because global warming means British winters are getting milder, and blackcurrant bushes have traditionally relied on that cold to grow properly.

The broader context here is that when one company depends so heavily on a single crop grown in one country, changes in the weather become a business risk. The 2026 harvest loss shows how a chain of bad weather, from winter flooding to summer heat, can quickly reduce the amount of fruit available. Suntory's two-part approach — fixing today's farming methods with the £200,000 fund, while breeding tougher plants for the future with the £920,000 commitment — tackles the same problem from two angles. Both are responses to the same reality: a supply chain at the mercy of increasingly unpredictable weather, where even a 10% drop in the harvest has real consequences for the company.