Most of us have a summer memory with a purple tongue in it. Picking berries along a hedgerow or a hillside, a pie cooling on the kitchen table, fingers stained so deep that no amount of scrubbing would shift it.

In Central Europe, where gfBar is made, that memory belongs to small forest berries – bilberries, the blueberry’s wild European cousin. This article is about their relatives across the Atlantic.

Cousins from Canada

Wild blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) grow in north-eastern North America, mainly in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, in Quebec and in the US state of Maine. They are low shrubs, barely knee-high, that spread through underground runners. A single plant can cover a patch of field and live for decades.

Nobody plants them. They grow on acidic, sandy soils left behind by retreating glaciers. The only thing farmers do is cut the shrubs back every other year so they can regenerate. The harvest is in August.

The cultivated blueberries you know from plastic punnets in the supermarket are a different species. They grow on bushes that can top two metres, in rows on plantations, and their berries are several times larger.

Smaller berry, more flavour

A wild blueberry is tiny. That means more skin per gram of fruit – and the skin is where the blue pigment, the anthocyanins, sits. According to the Wild Blueberry Association of North America, wild blueberries contain more anthocyanins than cultivated ones.

You can taste it too. The flavour is more intense, sharper and slightly tart. A cultivated blueberry is sweeter and more watery.

How many blueberries are in a gfBar

Dried wild blueberries from Nova Scotia make up 50% of the filling of every gfBar. Each bar contains the equivalent of 65 g of fresh blueberries. In a box of two bars, that’s 130 g.

Blueberries are fragile. That’s why we watch the temperature along the whole chain, from harvest through shipping and storage to production. We call it Temper Protect®. Temper Protect® means the blueberry never gets warmer than it has to – from the bush in Nova Scotia to the bar in your hand.

Wild blueberries aren’t cheap, and finding them in good quality in Europe isn’t easy. But without them, gfBar wouldn’t be gfBar. How they came into the founder’s life is told in the founder’s story.

And what does science say about wild blueberries? We looked at one interesting study in The King’s College study: what wild blueberries did for blood vessels and memory.