For what seemed like forever, the tomato was the thing most people pointed to when they wanted an example of all that had gone wrong with modern agriculture and the supermarket produce section. It was cottony and pink and had no flavor. Have you noticed that hardly anyone is saying that anymore?
This is not to suggest that the tomatoes at your neighborhood supermarket have suddenly gotten as good as the ones in your backyard (or at your local farmers’ market, or even at a high-end grocery), but remarkable progress has been made—at least in variety if not always in quality. Walk into your produce department today, particularly during the prime summer growing season, and you might find dozens of different kinds, some of them varieties that were available only to die-hard collectors just a few years ago.
What has happened is nothing more mysterious than the “invisible hand” of capitalism invoked by eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith. But ironically, whereas Smith was talking about how the preference for domestic goods indirectly benefited the consumer by strengthening local producers, in the case of tomatoes, it was a lust for imports that turned American farmers around.
Let’s back up a minute to those bad old days in the early 1990s. Back then, tomatoes basically came in two types: “mature-green” and “vine-ripe.” Those two classes made up more than 90 percent of the U.S. tomato harvest, although there were small amounts of other types as well: cherry tomatoes usually, and if you lived near an ethnic or upscale market, you could find Romas, or plums, too. In the summer, stores might promote something they called a beefsteak. Nobody liked any of them very much, but almost everyone accepted the situation as the way things were. If you wanted a good tomato, you had to grow your own.
One group that wasn’t complaining was the tomato farmers, who were doing a very good business. In 1994 fresh tomatoes were almost a $1 billion industry, and the farmers believed they had it all figured out. They had a good run of plants that resisted most common pests. They picked their fruit rock hard so it was practically indestructible. (At the time, a news photo of an overturned tomato truck showed a lot of twisted metal but most of the fruit intact.) When they needed to sell some tomatoes, they would gas them to some semblance of red. And best of all, they had a guaranteed market: it is almost unthinkable that a fast-food hamburger or taco would not have some tomato on it. In fact, the food service industry uses roughly half of all the fresh tomatoes grown in the United States.
To get a full understanding of the situation as it then stood it is worthwhile to linger for a moment on the subject of “mature-green” and “vine-ripe.” Although it might not be apparent to the consumer (since neither type tastes much like the tomato we remember), there’s more to the difference between them than simply the color at which they are picked. They actually come from different types of plants, are grown in different ways and are sometimes sold to different people.
Even today mature-green tomatoes make up the bulk of the fresh tomato harvest—somewhere around 75 percent. They are picked from plants that are called “determinate,” which means the vines grow only to a certain point and then stop. Determinate tomatoes grow on bushy plants that sprawl whichever way they will. Farmers don’t need to worry about training them because they’ll only get so big. Because of the way the plants are structured, harvesting them is a bit of a chore: the pickers have to sort through the foliage to find the fruit. This means that the fields are harvested in only one or two sweeps. Whenever a certain percentage of the tomatoes starts to show some color, almost everything gets picked. And when growers refer to “showing color,” they’re not seeing red. The first pale blush of green to cream is enough. As a result of this mass approach to harvesting, a good many of the tomatoes are significantly underripe when they are picked. This is not much of a problem for fast-food places, where tomatoes are used mainly as a source of symbolic color. And it even works for consumers in the winter, when most of us are so desperate for tomatoes that we’ll take almost anything we can get. The majority of these tomatoes are grown in Florida, which is about the only place that can grow tomatoes outdoors at that time of year. During the summer, when it’s too hot to grow in Florida, mature-green tomatoes come from the Central Valley of California.
Vine-ripe tomatoes come from plants that are called “indeterminate,” which means they will keep growing and producing tomatoes as long as there is sunlight and warmth. As a result, farmers need to stake them in place and keep them trained. The extra labor means that the tomatoes must be sold for a higher price, so they are picked a few days later than they would be if they were mature-green.
This improvement isn’t as dramatic as the name “vine-ripe” might imply. Usually they are harvested at what is called the “breaker” stage, when the fruit just begins to show some red (technically, not more than 10 percent of its surface). Still, a tomato matures quickly at this point in its life, and there can be a discernible difference in flavor. Also, because the plants are staked and trained, the fruit is easier to pick, so the harvest proceeds gradually rather than in one giant sweep. It’s not unusual for a vine-ripe field to be picked every other day; therefore, a higher percentage of the harvest will be ripe than with determinate tomatoes.
Because the plants are producing for such a long period of time, they need a fairly mild temperature. Most of the vine-ripe tomatoes grown in the United States come from the coastal regions of California, although vine-ripe tomatoes are among the most geographically dispersed crops, grown in thirty-five states.
As sweet as tomato growers might have thought they had it, nothing lasts forever. In the mid-1990s, the tomato world was turned upside down when imported fruit hit the American market with a bang. The shocking thing was where these revolutionary new imports came from. Imported tomatoes had long been a significant part of the American scene, particularly in the winter, but historically most imports came from Mexico, where a thriving tomato industry is located in the state of Sinaloa. (Imports from Mexico usually come close to equaling the individual harvest of either Florida or California.) The Mexicans had particularly good luck in the early 1990s with special breeds of tomatoes that could be picked a little later than mature-greens, so they had somewhat more flavor but still a long shelf life.
What took American farmers by surprise were the tomatoes coming from a most unexpected place: Holland. In the mid-1990s Dutch tomato exports to the United States skyrocketed, increasing more than 800 percent in only a couple of years. What was truly revolutionary was that these tomatoes didn’t fit the old mold. Rather than sending over another variation on the old mature-green/vine-ripe model as the Mexicans had done, Dutch farmers practically reinvented the tomato. As a result, Holland went from nowheresville in the tomato world to becoming the second-largest exporter to the United States.
Customers not only accepted this Dutch fruit; they actively sought it out. While American fresh tomato prices at wholesale hovered around 25 cents a pound, Dutch tomatoes averaged 80 cents. The effect on American growers was immediate and drastic. From 1992 to 1995 the wholesale price of domestic tomatoes dropped for three straight years, falling a total of almost one third. Within five years tomato imports tripled and domestic production declined by 20 percent. Florida, which had concentrated on winter-grown mature-greens, had to cut back its harvest by 40 percent.
Grown in hothouses, these new tomatoes could be lavished with the kind of care that resulted in fruit with something approaching real flavor. And they came in more colors and shapes than the typical red and round. Using tomato varieties developed primarily by Israeli breeders, the Dutch supplied American shoppers with squat tomatoes, yellow tomatoes and pear-shaped tomatoes. Most important (commercially anyway), some of these tomatoes were sold still clustered on the vine. The tomatoes themselves might not actually have had more flavor than other tomatoes, but they sure smelled as if they did to shoppers. Tomato greens are extremely aromatic—maybe even more so than the fruit—and much of what we remember as a fresh tomato’s perfume is actually the smell of the vines and leaves.
Developed in Italy and enthusiastically embraced by Dutch greenhouse growers, tomatoes on the vine (known in the industry as TOV) became an important category within only a few years. By 1999 tomatoes on the vine accounted for 13 percent of all greenhouse tomatoes sold in the United States, and by 2003 they represented almost a quarter.
Although this slight increase in variety hardly seems revolutionary today, it was a grand start considering the time and place. Produce managers quickly found that offering an assortment of tomatoes increased the sales not just of the new types but of the old ones as well. Consumers, it seems, like to have options—even if they often end up buying the same old thing. The produce section with the greatest assortment of products is the one that is judged the best. This started a veritable tomato arms race among high-end supermarkets. Grocery stores that not long before had carried three or four types of tomatoes suddenly were carrying eight or nine. And some ultra-ambitious retailers were advertising as many as twenty-two different types of tomatoes.
As radical as this seemed, it was really only the first step. In 1997 hothouse tomatoes—buzz-worthy though they were—generated only about 7 percent of retail tomato sales in the United States. And considering the cost of transporting fresh produce from Holland, it was unlikely that Dutch tomatoes would ever be more than an attractive niche item.
But then came another shock: more imports from another totally unexpected quarter. Canadian growers started adapting the Dutch tricks, and from a much more manageable distance. The idea that a country widely regarded by Americans as the frozen north could excel at growing tomatoes seemed even more far-fetched than that the Dutch could. But the Canadian greenhouse tomato industry proved to be an even bigger threat. From almost nothing in the early 1990s, Canadian tomato exports to the United States increased 600 percent by 2003, eventually accounting for 17 percent of all American tomato sales and a whopping 37 percent of all American tomato sales at retail. (Those long-lasting, easy-slicing mature-greens continue to dominate food service, which still accounts for half of all tomatoes sold.) Wholesale prices for domestic tomatoes, which had started to improve (or at least stabilize) after the Dutch invasion, tumbled again, falling two out of three years from 1999 to 2001 and losing a net 10 percent.
These two invasions threw American farmers into a tizzy. Fresh tomato production overall has grown only 8 percent since 1990, and in Florida it has actually declined since the introduction of hothouse tomatoes. Even in California, where high-quality vine-ripes resisted competition somewhat better, growers were forced to rethink how they did business. Because of the extremely high costs of starting up greenhouses in the United States (the price of establishing a greenhouse full of tomatoes runs to more than $1 million per acre, as opposed to around $3,000 for field tomatoes), the hothouse option has been pretty much off the table. There are only four large growers of hothouse tomatoes in the United States, and the industry as a whole has been racked by financial uncertainty.
In Florida, some growers shifted to other varieties. Mature-greens dropped from more than 85 percent of the total harvest in 1997 to less than 75 percent in 2003. Tomatoes other than mature-greens and vine-ripes went from almost nothing in 1997 to more than 15 percent of the total harvest in 2003. Other growers adapted by simply picking their mature-greens later. More than 10 percent of Florida’s mature-greens were picked at the vine-ripe stage in 2003. In California, the share of mature-greens declined from more than three quarters to just over two thirds.
Some adventurous growers began exploring other tomato options, including heirloom varieties that not long ago were found only in the gardens of passionate collectors who saved seeds at the end of each season to share among themselves.
Heirloom tomatoes such as Brandywine, Cherokee Purple and Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter were the results of hundreds of chance mutations and eons of human migrations. They came from Italy and France, Spain and Poland, even Russia. They were everything mainstream tomatoes were not—the kind of fruit that made their fans think smugly, You won’t find that in the supermarket. By definition, heirloom tomatoes are open-pollinated, as opposed to hybrid, so the seeds grow true to the parents. (Although there is no formal age limit, it is generally agreed that an heirloom variety must have been around for at least three generations to qualify.)
You can usually recognize heirloom tomatoes first by their imperfections. They are plainly and outspokenly old-fashioned. They tend to have unusual shapes and frequently odd colors. They wear their wrinkles and blemishes as signs of character. Amid the perfect uniformity of the modern produce section, they stick out like the Queen Mum at a fashion shoot.
But their appeal is undeniable—and profitable. When most tomatoes sold for less than $2 a pound, heirlooms went for as much as $6. And even at those prices, there was no shortage of buyers. At some high-end groceries, heirloom tomatoes became the single best-selling summer produce item in terms of dollar volume. Ironically, most of these heirlooms had at one time or another been discarded by commercial growers because of their cosmetic blemishes, thought to discourage shoppers, and because they have much thinner skins that puncture easily, leading to rapid spoilage.
First the heirlooms caught on at farmers’ markets. When chefs snapped them up and bought as many as they could, the cult of the heirloom tomato was born. Suddenly, every tomato in every fancy restaurant had a provenance that was spelled out in excruciating detail on the menu. High-end produce managers weren’t sleeping. They began to seek them out, too. To be sure, these tomatoes rated hardly a blip on the radar screen of the commercial tomato world.
No one keeps statistics on them, but today there are almost certainly fewer than 300 acres of heirloom tomatoes grown in all of California (as opposed to more than 30,000 acres of fresh tomatoes total). Still, they have had an influence that far outweighed their actual dollar worth. Not only did they reinforce the message to produce marketers that the old variety paradigms weren’t working, but they also prompted some supermarket chains to change their distribution patterns.
The industry standard is to have all fresh tomatoes delivered to a central warehouse, where they are sorted and from which they are shipped to individual stores, a process that can take two or three days. (This is for upscale groceries. Most tomatoes go through even more hands between farm and market.) Because heirloom tomatoes were such a premium product, some markets began allowing individual farmers to deliver their tomatoes directly to the stores. This allows an extra two or three days of ripening before harvest, which can result in an immense improvement in flavor. The heirloom boom also further blurred the line between farmers’ markets and supermarkets, as many growers supplied both. Today, during the peak summer months, it’s not uncommon to find heirloom tomatoes with the name of your favorite farmers’ market grower both in specialty markets and at supermarkets clear across the country.
Although it is good to see these old varieties finding new popularity, many hard-core tomato fans question whether something vital is being lost in the translation. Is an old tomato variety grown, picked and packed by modern commercial standards really worth celebrating? Frequently, the answer is no. Tomatoes are grown, not manufactured. They are not Fords (or even Cadillacs), and there is more to good quality than a brand name, no matter if it is Brandywine or Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. To make the long journey to market, in many cases these heirlooms were being picked at the vine-ripe stage or even earlier. Too often these were heirloom tomatoes in name only.
The next great stage in tomato evolution delivered much better flavor on a consistent basis. Called grapes, or miniatures, these tiny tomatoes, about the size of the tip of your little finger, are amazingly sweet. Best of all for the growers, they have a thick skin that not only pops when you bite into them but also protects them well enough that they can be harvested at nearly full ripeness. Although they resemble the little cherry tomatoes that have been with us forever, these new tomatoes are something different.
The first grape tomatoes—which are a little smaller than cherry tomatoes and more oblong than round—began hitting store shelves on the East Coast in 1997. One of the truly radical things about these miniature tomatoes was that, compared to heirlooms, they followed the reverse path to popularity, starting out as a commercial product and then filtering down to small farmers and gardeners. Miniatures were introduced by a commercial grower in Florida named Andrew Chu, who had heard about them from a friend in Taiwan. He ordered the seeds from the Known-You Seed Company there and first planted them in 1996. In 1997 he began packaging the tomatoes in easily recognizable, clear plastic clamshell boxes and distributing them to supermarkets on the East Coast. When other growers tasted these tomatoes, they jumped on the bandwagon. When Chu tried to trademark the name “grape tomato” in 1998 to protect his market share, a series of legal battles ensued, which were eventually settled out of court.
All the while, the tomatoes were gaining in popularity. Between 1999 and 2003 the volume of grape and cherry tomatoes sold increased more than 300 percent, and their price—already higher than those of standard tomatoes—increased more than 400 percent over the same period. People weren’t buying the little gems just because they were cute; they were buying them because they tasted better.
Most miniature tomatoes are naturally sweeter than their bigger brothers. Whereas regular tomatoes have a sugar content of 4 or 5 percent, cherry and grape tomatoes reliably sweeten into the 8 to 9 percent range, and sometimes even higher. Because they’re so small, they ripen much more quickly than regular tomatoes—a real boon in cool, cloudy climates—and they last longer after picking than do other tomatoes, so they can be picked nearly dead ripe and still be delicious a week later when you get them home from the supermarket. In fact, one of the biggest hurdles tomato farmers faced was teaching crews how to pick them. Rather than harvesting tomatoes at the slightest sign of a blush, pickers needed to be taught to wait until the colors develop fully.
The original grape tomatoes belonged to a single red variety called Santa, but they now come in a dazzling assortment of colors and shapes. Some are round, some are grape-shaped, and some look like miniature pears. They are every color in the tomato rainbow: red, green, yellow, white, even purple-black. Sungold, a yellow, is well on its way to being an established favorite, as is Juliet, a red oval. Candy looks like a miniature German Pineapple tomato, and Tigerella is striped red and yellow. Taste an assortment of them, and you’ll realize there is no such thing as one single “tomato flavor.” Rather there is a spectrum, running from almost lemony to nearly beefy.
Fresh tomato consumption, which was less than 12½ pounds per person through the 1970s and early 1980s, now stands at more than 19 pounds. Total sales have increased to more than $1.3 billion—behind only lettuces in the commercial vegetable hierarchy. Even Florida, so battered by the initial flood of imports, has rebounded. And of the 1.5 billion pounds of tomatoes it grows every year, fully 7 percent are the high-flavor, high-profit grapes. Much more important for consumers, what once stood as a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with commercial agriculture now represents a promise of what can be accomplished with a return to the simple values of flavor and variety. Although Adam Smith would no doubt be dumbfounded at a world in which so much attention is paid to a single fruit (and so much money can be made from it), it’s hard to imagine that he would not be thrilled by the result.