Ensuring food security for a rapidly growing world population will need new approaches. These include speed breeding and new breeding technologies, which have been established for major staple crops. Improvement of woody perennial fruit tree species has progressed at a much slower pace and has met many obstacles. Yet fruit production will face major challenges with climate change, such as the loss of winter chilling needed for flowering, a potential decrease in pollinator availability, and increasing pest and disease problems.

Actinidia chinensis (kiwifruit) is an important fresh fruit crop, with varieties only several generations removed from the wild accessions and carrying only a fraction of the available genetic diversity [1, 2]. Improvement of traits such as fruit quality and storage, and resistance to emergent diseases underpin the breeding efforts, which are hampered by a long generation time, large plant size, dependence on chilling for budbreak and flowering, dioecy and different ploidy levels. In addition to kiwifruit, the genus Actinidia consists of more than 50 species with edible fruit, all showing tremendous potential as future fruit crops [3]. Their fast domestication and improvement will enable production of high-quality healthy fruit, contributing to food security in the changing climate conditions.