In early 2010, I enjoyed a supermarket experience that I’d never had before. I bought a pretty, stridently red winter tomato that actually tasted like something. It was by no means a great tomato, harboring only hints of the flavor wattage of a vine-ripened August tomato, but it was nonetheless unmistakably a tomato, in taste as well as appearance. As is de rigueur with so-called premium produce nowadays, my purchase, which weighed three-quarters of a pound and cost $3.47, versus 80 cents a pound for its nearby commodity cousins, bore a little sticker with the trademarked name Tasti-Lee. A few days later, I returned to the same store hoping to replenish my tomato larder, but the Tasti-Lees had all been sold. And I was left to ask, what made this tomato so different? How come I had never heard of it? Why don’t all supermarket tomatoes taste like it did? And where could I get more?
With those questions on my mind, I drove to the University of Florida’s Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, a curvilinear structure faced with pinkish bricks that rises like a space station from the endless fields of strawberries and tomatoes a half hour’s drive southeast of Tampa. There, in an office crammed with all manner of tomato kitsch—coffee mugs, antique labels for packing boxes, framed vintage magazine advertisements for Campbell’s Tomato Soup, tomato piggy banks, tomato salt and pepper shakers, and teetering stacks of—who knew—The Tomato magazine—I met John Warner Scott, a professor of horticultural sciences. Scott, who is known far and wide in the tomato business as “Jay,” is one of the most prolific breeders of new tomatoes in the state. Over his three-decade career at the university, he has developed more than thirty varieties, although he doesn’t keep track. “I haven’t gone back and counted in a while,” he told me. Unlike seedsmen who rely on molecular biology, DNA sequencing, and in the case of some crops, genetic modification, Scott is the last of a dying line of old-fashioned plant breeders. His tools are the same ones the great nineteenth-century tomato grower Alexander Livingston used to develop the Paragon: a keen eye, a disciplined palate, and superhuman reserves of patience. Each year, Scott grows several hundred different varieties of tomatoes, called “parent lines,” in test plots surrounding the Gulf Coast center. His goal is to find plants with complementary traits—one may have disease resistance but low yields, another high yields but weak immunity—and crossbreed them hoping that some of the offspring will carry the best traits of both parents. Toiling in the hot sun, Scott pulled a floppy sun hat over his close-cropped graying hair and plodded through the rows, notebook in hand, carefully examining each plant and ticking off a mental checklist: How many fruits has it set? Are they big? Do they have cracks? Are their bottoms smooth and rounded, or do they still have scar tissue where the blossoms fell off? What’s the color like? “With some of them, you can just look at the plant and just throw it out,” he said.
If a plant passed visual muster, Scott took out his pocket knife and, still standing in the field, lopped off a slice and tasted it. “Plant breeding is a matter of seeing what’s good,” he said. “But you can’t make any decisions based on one season. You have to grow a variety a lot of times in a lot of environments to see if it’s really good.”
Tasti-Lee is not perfect. Its fruits are smaller than commercial growers like. But it is as close as Scott has ever come to finding Tomatoland’s Holy Grail—a fruit thick-skinned enough to shrug off the insults of modern agribusiness, but still tender at heart and tasting like a tomato should. . . .
Developing a better tomato can take years, and even then, there is no guarantee that it will be picked up by professional growers and have a shot at commercial acceptance. Florida’s multimillion-dollar tomato industry is littered with once promising but now forgotten varieties. But in early 2010, after more than a decade of painstaking growing, breeding, and crossbreeding, Tasti-Lee left the rarified confines of academic test plots and rigorously monitored consumer-tasting panels to try to make its way in the competitive hurly-burly of the produce section. If Tasti-Lee lives up to its early promise, Scott will achieve a plant breeder’s version of immortality. The rest of us finally will be able to head to the local supermarket any day of the year and bring home a half-decent-tasting tomato.
But it won’t be an inexpensive tomato. Scott developed the Tasti-Lee to provide farmers in his state with a crop that can be planted outside to compete with hydroponic, greenhouse-grown tomatoes, the latest competitive threat to the Florida fresh tomato industry. Beginning from almost nothing in the early 1990s, greenhouse tomatoes expanded from a tiny niche-market novelty mostly imported from Europe to a mainstream produce item. They are now in every supermarket and account for about 10 percent of fresh tomato sales. Although Florida’s field-grown slicing tomatoes remain as popular as ever in the food-service industry, sales have declined sharply in supermarkets. With Tasti-Lee, Scott hopes to give growers a baseball-size tomato that packs the same flavor as the popular ping pong ball–size salad tomatoes produced in greenhouses and often sold in clusters on the vine. “It seems to me that it would be a win-win situation,” said Scott. “Consumers tend to be spoiled. They go into the grocery store and they expect to see fresh tomatoes any time of year, even if they grumble about the quality. I want people to buy Tasti-Lees because they like them, not just because they are the only tomatoes there.”
Like many plant varieties, Tasti-Lee owes its existence to a combination of serendipity and the time-sharpened instincts of a great plant breeder. In Florida, the summer of 1998 was a terrible season for anyone trying to grow a tasty tomato. For some unknown reason—too wet, too cloudy, too hot—Scott’s tomato field tests failed to produce fruits with any sweetness. Even tried-and-true varieties that had been sweet during previous years tasted dull. But one morning after tasting fifty varieties, each more bland than the other, Scott spotted a nice-looking tomato called Florida 7907. He picked a fruit, cut off a wedge, and popped it into his mouth. “Aha!” he said.
It was sweet, but Florida had one big flaw that made the variety a nonstarter for commercial production: It was too spherical. Florida growers like their fruits to have defined shoulders and slightly flattened bottoms. And that’s only one item on a list of must-haves. Because producers are paid strictly by the pound, plants first and foremost must produce high yields of large, uniform fruit. They have to be able to resist diseases and tolerate extremes of heat and cold. And their tomatoes need to have a long shelf life. Taste enters the equation, if it enters at all, only after all those conditions are met. “Sometimes I wonder why we even bother with flavor,” said Scott. “There is no easy way to breed for taste. It’s not like there’s one genetic marker that tomatoes must have to taste good,” he said.
The structure of a tomato also makes breeding for both taste and toughness a difficult balancing act. The grocery part of a tomato, called locular jelly, has most of the all-important acidity. The pericarp tissue, the walls of a tomato, give it strength and some sweetness, but no acidity. The harder a tomato is, the more bland it is likely to taste. Even if you have a perfect balance of sugars and acids, there are still many obstacles in getting decent-tasting tomatoes from field to consumers’ kitchens. Most Florida tomatoes are picked at the so-called mature green stage. Under ideal circumstances, a mature green tomato, reddened by being exposed to ethylene gas, will ripen and develop a measure of taste—not great taste, but something. The problem is that short of cutting one open, there is no definite way to tell a mature green tomato from one that is simply green. Inevitably, some immature tomatoes get picked and they will never develop flavor, although the ethylene will give them the appearance of ripeness. Finally, even if all else goes according to plan, a tomato can lose its taste if exposed to cold temperatures at any time between harvest and being eaten, after which point it can never recover it. Crop specialists even have a scientific term for this process: “chilling injury.” Whether it happens in a truck, warehouse, produce section, or home refrigerator, a tomato that is held at temperatures lower than 50 degrees soon becomes a tasteless tomato. For reasons unknown, chilling reduces the fragrant volatile chemicals that are all-important in giving the fruit its distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, keeping tomatoes cool extends their shelf life, too, so the temptation to refrigerate dogs tomatoes every step of their journey to the table. Years of efforts by a plant breeder can be destroyed by a few days in a refrigerator.
Scott was also developing a line of what he calls “ultrafirm” tomatoes during the same season he happened on the sweet-flavored 7907. Among those he was developing was a tomato called Florida 8059. It was hard and had the right shape. Sensing a match made in heaven, Scott crossbred the sweet but too-spherical 7907 with the firmer 8059, and in the fall of 2002 the first of what was then referred to as Florida 8153 ripened. Scott thought the new hybrid carried the best traits of both parents. At trials conducted by the university, consumers on test panels agreed. Time after time, 8153 beat out other tomatoes. Subsequent chemical analyses showed that the fruit had a desirable balance of sugars, acids, and volatiles. It also had a surprise bonus: Both of its parents possessed what plant breeders call the “crimson” gene, which was originally revealed when the pioneering tomato geneticist Charlie Rick crossed a wild L. chilense (a relative of the domestic tomato) with a commonly grown variety. The crimson gene gives 8153 a striking fire-engine red color and an extraordinarily high level of lycopene, a sought-after antioxidant. “It sounds like magic, doesn’t it?” said Scott. “It really is, in a way.”
Florida 8153 had everything going for it, except for a catchy, appetizing name. Scott christened and trademarked his new baby Tasti-Lee, Lee being the first name of his mother-in-law, a tomato lover who had encouraged and supported his research through the years. “You hear lots of stories about bad mothers-in-law, I had a great mother-in-law,” Scott said, a flash of emotion overcoming his usual deadpan. “She had tasted what was then still just called Florida 8153. She really liked it and encouraged me. Sadly, she fell terminally ill. I went to visit her in the hospital. She was in a coma at that point, but I took in a tomato anyway and showed it to her and told her that I was going to name it after her. I like to think she heard me.”
Four seed companies lined up to bid for rights from the university to produce and distribute Tasti-Lee seeds. The winner was Bejo Seeds, Inc. A large, family-owned, Dutch firm with offices around the world, Bejo’s specialties are cabbage, carrots, and other cool-weather crops. “We felt that marketing would be a key to Tasti-Lee’s success,” said Scott. “It seemed like Bejo would be hungry to get into the tomato market and that they would push Tasti-Lee pretty hard.”
The job of giving Tasti-Lee that push fell to Greg Styers, Bejo’s sales and product development manager for the southeastern United States, who has been known to board airplanes lugging twenty-five-pound boxes of tomatoes as carry-on baggage. “We had a vision to start with a grassroots movement,” said Styers. “We were going to start with roadside growers and chefs. People who were interested in good flavor and good quality. Then we were going to work our way up.” It didn’t turn out as planned. Styers, who was looking for a grower who shared his vision that Tasti-Lee was “born to be a premium tomato,” approached Whitworth Farms, which grows vegetables on seven hundred acres near Boca Raton, making it a small player in the Florida tomato business. “Whitworth was big enough to deal with some large retailers, but small enough that they were willing to take a chance on Tasti-Lee. It was a perfect fit for us,” said Styers.
One of Whitworth’s customers was Whole Foods Market. Glenn Whitworth, who owns the farm along with his sister and two brothers, approached one of the company’s produce buyers. Weeks went by before the buyer would even schedule a meeting with Styers and Whitworth. When they did finally get some time, Styers stopped by a Whole Foods store beforehand and bought one of every tomato on display and added a Tasti-Lee to the mix. On the basis of that impromptu conference room taste test, the buyer agreed to test-market Tasti-Lee. In February 2010,Tasti-Lees began appearing in sixteen Whole Foods stores in Florida. By late March, reorders were coming in faster than Whitworth could grow Tasti-Lees. Later that spring, Whole Foods stores as far north as Washington, DC, began to carry Tasti-Lees, and by the end of the year, other retailers and even a few restaurant chains were expressing interest. “I think the stars really lined up for Jay when he developed this variety. It truly is remarkable,” Styers said.
Scott, who drawls his carefully chosen words with little inflection and almost no emotion, didn’t go that far. “I stand behind it,” he said. “For a full-size tomato, it’s better in my opinion than what’s out there. Hopefully, it goes.” If it doesn’t, Scott has plenty to keep him busy. He’s currently developing heat-tolerant tomatoes, tomatoes with resistance to the virulent leaf-curl virus, and tomatoes that can be grown on the ground and theoretically harvested by machine. And he hasn’t given up on flavor. “In some work we’ve done, there is this fruity-floral note that adds pique to the sweetness,” he said. “We’ve crossed a big, crimson tomato with that trait into one of Tasti-Lee’s parents. The result might have even better flavor.”