It might be hard to describe exactly how a perfect tomato tastes, but most people would probably agree that a firm, sun-ripened, juicy tomato is better than a mealy, pale one. No surprise: Getting more appetizing produce onto supermarket shelves and people’s plates is a priority for food growers and the grocery industry. Copious research and development is going into breeding the perfect tomato, whether it’s intended to be chopped up for a salad or processed into ketchup.
Growing produce that people are excited to buy and eat isn’t solely a matter of taste. A key ingredient in many world cuisines, tomatoes are a good source of several important vitamins and minerals. Breeding efforts aimed at making fruits and vegetables more appealing, affordable and nutrient-rich play an underappreciated role in addressing global food insecurity and malnutrition. According to a report from the United Nations, an estimated 3.1 billion people can’t afford to consume a healthy diet, and 735 million people are undernourished. And as a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, only 10% of adults eat the recommended daily serving of vegetables, while just over 12% consume enough fruit.
Plant breeders are working hard to change those numbers by developing and breeding fruits and vegetables that not only taste delicious, but also require less water and soil to grow and are more climate-resilient and pest-resistant. Innovative breeding techniques can also help produce last longer on the shelf, reducing food loss and waste.
Bayer’s plant breeding programs focus on more than 20 such crops, including tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, melons, onions and strawberries. Together with its industry-leading genomic capabilities and globally connected ecosystem of customer insights, the platform—known as Precision Breeding—allows plant scientists to design seeds tailored to the specific needs of growers, field conditions and agronomic practices all over the world. By providing more varieties that appeal to a greater number of people while supporting growers’ needs, Bayer aims to address global malnutrition, climate change and a variety of other challenges—all with the help of a tiny seed.
“We are driving the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables by providing more varieties that taste better and are more enticing to consumers, while balancing that with higher marketable yield for growers,” says J.D. Rossouw, head of vegetables research and development at Bayer.
Supporting Growers Where It Counts
Today, to be a grower is to contend with a host of complex and interrelated climate challenges, including new diseases and pests, drought, higher temperatures and extreme weather conditions. These issues are pushing farmers to seek different solutions as they work to deliver produce people are truly excited to eat.
“In this environment, growers need new technologies because their problems are different from the problems they’ve had before,” says Vonnie Estes, vice president of innovation at the International Fresh Produce Association. “I was talking to a strawberry grower the other day, and he said, ‘We have this fly, a new pest, that we have no solution for. If it moves into a field, we lose the whole harvest—which means less money, or lower margins, to the grower in an already tough environment.’”
We have three main goals for plant breeding: growing more marketable produce, breeding genetic varieties that improve transportability and reduce food waste, and ensuring our fruit and vegetables taste great, so people consume more.
Techniques like gene editing provide the ability to introduce desired traits efficiently and safely, creating a faster path to developing produce that is drought-tolerant, uses less water and tastes better, with the desired juiciness and texture. New varieties of fruits and vegetables can also help growers better respond to labor costs and shortages, and aid in mechanized farming, like Bayer’s High Rise broccoli—which grows tall enough to allow for mechanical harvesting.
These techniques are accelerating the breeding cycle from five or six years to around four months, the company says. Additionally, using artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, Bayer deploys 400 to 500 new seed products annually, each of which goes through an average of 140 data-backed models to reach commercialization.
What if we stopped using pesticides?
“We have three main goals for plant breeding: growing more marketable produce, breeding genetic varieties that improve transportability and reduce food waste, and ensuring our fruit and vegetables taste great, so people consume more,” Rossouw says. “We know we can’t address every single demand globally, so we find the right partners and collaborators that work with us in developing the best product for the right markets.”
In the United Arab Emirates, Bayer has partnered with agritech company Silal for comprehensive vegetable seed trials for tomatoes, cucumbers and melons in various controlled-environment agriculture and open-field setups, aiming to identify varieties with increased crop endurance, quality and shelf life in desert farming conditions. Another partner, U.S.-based food startup Pairwise, has developed better-tasting mustard greens that Bayer is taking to market this year. And with G+FLAS Life Sciences, a South Korean biotech company, Bayer is collaborating on gene-edited tomato varieties nutritionally enhanced with vitamin D3—an innovation Bayer is planning to take to market in various regions where vitamin D deficiency is particularly problematic.
Accounting for Taste
The tomato is the perfect test case for new breeding technologies. According to the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, it’s the world’s most popular vegetable (even if it’s technically a fruit).
“The tomato is ubiquitous in cuisines across European, African and Middle-Eastern countries, for example,” says Barbara Bray, a food safety and nutrition consultant. “It’s packed with vitamins A, C and E, contains the antioxidant lycopene, and includes folate and potassium, which promote healthy blood pressure and support the nervous system.”
Bayer is currently researching tomato varieties that boast improved shelf life and require more than 20% less water to grow, but still have the same taste, quality and yield. Among its data-gathering techniques: a “demo greenhouse” in the Netherlands where customers, growers and consumers can taste test several distinct tomato varieties. Their findings are then brought back into the R&D pipeline and put to work by the company’s plant breeders and research scientists.
In the end, the goal is to grow delicious tomatoes and other healthy produce people actually want to eat—and ensure it’s available, accessible and affordable to populations around the world.
“By increasing the quantity of fruit and vegetables we have in our diet, we can help improve the quality of health for people, especially those who are undernourished,” Bray says. “Food is only nutritious if you eat it.”
