Is there a way I can do this?

I have a spreadsheet with a list of branches in cells A1 - A300. I then
have columns of data for each of the past 5 years (ie; B - F) and want to
count the number of instances where particular items occur in each column
(ie; 'apples' or 'oranges', etc). The difficulty is that in some cells
there is more than one item shown ... eg: cell C10 may have 'apples' and
'oranges' - the data is entered this way using 'Alt+Enter' to delimit the 2
items as I don't want rows with empty cells.

Is there a way of counting the items even though they are not in separate
cells? Or is there a better way of approaching this?

Many thanks.