Vegetable Varieties Being Put to the Taste Test
November 11, 2020 When you hear about new vegetable varieties, you’ll hear about new resistances, better yields, and how well they ship. It’s natural for vegetable growers to focus on these pragmatic traits, since they are so basic to growing healthy crops.
But all those traits focus on the grower, not end customers. They’re focused on what tastes good, looks appealing, and offers nutrition. And your customers have been increasing their demands for those characteristics.
I reached out to breeders to find out how they’re developing new vegetable varieties for customers without sacrificing vital production features.
“It is a long, traditional breeding process, but through plant selection we can select for traits that deliver on grower needs like shape, color, size, shelflife and ease of harvest, while improving flavors that fit consumer needs,” says Robb Bertels, Senior Manager of Business Development at Sakata.
Breeders Work to Identify Consumer Needs
Each seed company has a different approach to understanding what consumers value in vegetables. Bayer Vegetables Seeds meets regularly with an advisory board made up of people throughout the vegetable industry, from those dealing directly with consumers to growers.
“It’s a forum to get insights. … It keeps us grounded,” says Gilles Galliou, Head of Commercial Operations for Bayer Vegetable Seeds in the Americas.
Galliou says each person should walk away from the meetings saying they learned something new.
HM.CLAUSE’s Communications Manager Marc Nerius says their crop teams discuss consumers’ vegetable desires regularly.
“We discuss consumer demands for nutrition content and flavor a lot internally with our fruit quality teams and are actively working on ways to have high throughput flavor assessments.”
Nerius says they understand that consumer-based traits ultimately determine grocery store success.
Grower needs dominate, naturally, since they’re the ones paying seed company bills. Few crops have the name recognition that, say, ‘Honeycrisp’ has among apples. So crops with more consumer-focused characteristics may be in the mix offered to you, but what you’ll hear most about is that they are all but bullet proof in the field.
It’s a balancing game, Bertels says.
“We work to balance the grower community needs with consumer needs,” he says.
Which traits to aim for? Continue reading at GrowingProduce.com.
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