The big question I was left pondering after attending the enthusiastic blueberry conference in London last week, is whether the industry will respond to demand. Apart from a few specialists - some of which I visited back in the 1960s - the UK sector is by any standards, minuscule.

Therefore starting from scratch is going to take quite an effort, especially as I also gleaned that bushes take two years to reach a point where they can be ordered, and another two years before any real volume of fruit can be picked.

The up-side is records show that with the right loving care, plantations can last for up to 40 years. But for strawberry and raspberry growers used to working on a far shorter time scale this must seem like quite a wait.

Then there is the question of profitability. It is not often that estimates of this type get displayed on-screen at conferences, but Hargreaves Plants, a co-sponsor of the event, was bold enough to hazard an informed guess. Apparently establishing a hectare of fruit yielding 6lb a plant costs around £52,000, but has a gross return of just under £100,000 on present prices.

I have found growers are always ultra-cautious about admitting to making a living, so it will be intriguing to see how these figures stack up. I am told unofficially the pounds and pence look “interesting”.

The brightest hope of course is that the fruit’s popularity will increase at the same rate. The UK has a history of following the US in many things, including eating habits. So perhaps blueberry muffins, jam, drinks, and of course fresh fruit will follow the same course. Whether I will be around to report the event is another matter, but here’s hoping.

Conferences such as this often become conduits for other issues as they plug into the great amorphous industry that is fresh produce involving the length of the chain from plant-breeding to high-street retailing.

A lot of people will agree with Stuart Stubbins’s view that no matter how hard they are promoted, some exotics will never achieve critical volume.

The fun is to try and judge the winners and losers. While he suggested - probably to the ire of UK importers - that pomegranates, physalis, starfruit and kumquats all fall into the losers category, over the years I think the trade could even add a few more.

The editor might like to take a poll to see the response to cocktail avocados the size of a forefinger that first came out of Israel in the 1970s. Or measure opinion on the more recent appearance of a yam-like product called crosnes which looks something like bait used by fishermen. The list is endless, but who knows? There might be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I remember disparaging arguments about grapefruit, avocados and kiwifruit in the past, and they haven’t done too badly.

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