Ingredients · Fruit

Blueberry

Vaccinium spp. · Ericaceae (heath family)

Blueberry
Dried blueberries and sometimes the leaf — seven products carry one or the other. The berry brings a deep, slightly winey sweetness and the anthocyanins that make a cup go purple-red; the leaf, like strawberry leaf, brings tannin and body rather than fruit. For a Canadian shop the blueberry is the most local thing in the fruit drawer: Canada picked 165,608 tonnes of wild and cultivated blueberries in 2024, and wild lowbush picking is a Quebec and Maritimes industry.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partBerry
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromNorth America (native range)
TasteDeep, winey sweetness with a soft acidity; stains the cup purple-red

How to use it

In berry infusions, hot and iced. It stains everything it touches, which is often the point. Rehydrates well. The leaf steeps as a mild tea-like base in herbal blends.

With food

Lemon. Cream and yogurt. Maple. Vanilla. Almond. Cinnamon. Cornmeal and pastry. Lavender.

With spices

Vanilla. Cinnamon. Lemon peel. Cardamom. Lavender.

With tea

White tea, rooibos and matcha, all of which it is blended with here. Black tea. Hibiscus and elderberry.

Its story

Where it comes from

Commercial blueberries, both wild lowbush and cultivated highbush, are all native to North America. Lowbush berries are small, pea-sized, on low bushes; highbush are larger, on taller cultivated plants, and were introduced to Europe in the 1930s. Of Canada's 2024 lowbush crop, Quebec led with 47 per cent, then New Brunswick at 26, Nova Scotia at 17 and Prince Edward Island at 10.

What happened

The cultivated blueberry is barely a hundred years old and it exists because of a collaboration between a USDA botanist and a New Jersey farmer's daughter. Frederick Vernon Coville began working on blueberries after 1910 and worked out what nobody had — that the plant needs acid soil, and how its pollination works. Elizabeth Coleman White, whose family farmed in the New Jersey pine barrens, paid local pickers to find the best wild bushes in the woods for him to breed from. By 1916 Coville had succeeded, and the blueberry became a crop. Everything in a supermarket punnet descends from that work.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

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