SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
From the Honeycrisp apple to Cotton Candy grapes to the Flavor Bomb tomato, branded produce is having a moment right now. Kenny Malone, from our Planet Money podcast, teamed up with Dan Pashman from the The Sporkful podcast to find out why.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
DAN PASHMAN: This is exciting, Kenny. Can we just stop and...
KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: Let's behold.
PASHMAN: We're looking at a field of tomato plants at an experimental farm in New Jersey.
Are these Scarlet Sunrise plants zero? Like, this is the birthplace.
TOM ORTON: Yes.
MALONE: Tom Orton is a retired Rutgers agriculture professor.
PASHMAN: And the Scarlet Sunrise is a new kind of grape tomato he started to create more than 10 years ago with his colleague Pete Nitzsche.
PETE NITZSCHE: I noticed in the field there was one cherry tomato called Isis Candy.
PASHMAN: Isis Candy was sweet. The color was a mix of red and yellow.
ORTON: We call it a bicolor.
MALONE: But...
NITZSCHE: The Isis Candy also cracked a lot.
PASHMAN: So bad as a grocery store tomato.
MALONE: But they thought, what if they crossed that sweet bicolor cherry with a non-cracking grape tomato?
ORTON: We figured people could identify it in the marketplace and therefore connect the flavor with the appearance, and there'd be repeat purchases of specifically this product.
PASHMAN: Old public land grant universities, like Rutgers, have a mandate to help local farmers by doing things like cultivating foods that farmers can sell for more money.
MALONE: And over the past 50 years, laws have also changed to allow universities to own and profit off of plant genetics as well.
PASHMAN: The Honeycrisp apple - that's made more than $20 million for the University of Minnesota.
MALONE: The Cosmic Crisp Apple - that's made more than $30 million for Washington State University.
MIGUEL GOMEZ: The market is going toward these crazy amount of new options in each product category.
MALONE: Cornell agricultural economist Miguel Gomez says part of this has to do with a classic economic pitfall known as the commodity trap.
PASHMAN: Yeah, if you grow a commodity like, say, soybeans, you compete by trying to be the cheapest, which is a tough way to make a living.
MALONE: But if growers can somehow make their products special, they can break free and actually charge more for it.
PASHMAN: To a point - eventually, there can be so many crispy apples that they start to all seem the same.
GOMEZ: You know, there is what we call the cost of searching for consumers. You know, when you have too many options, it becomes a burden to consumers.
PASHMAN: I tried to buy almond butter a few weeks ago, and I almost had a panic attack in the aisle.
GOMEZ: Exactly.
PASHMAN: It's...
(LAUGHTER)
GOMEZ: Yeah, exactly.
MALONE: I'm not allergic to almond butter. I'm allergic to the number of...
PASHMAN: Yeah.
MALONE: ...Almonds butter. Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
GOMEZ: Yes, exactly.
PASHMAN: But tomatoes - Gomez thinks the branded tomato market is not yet saturated.
MALONE: Good news for our Rutgers scientists Pete Orton and Tom Nitzsche.
ORTON: Yeah, so you guys can have these.
PASHMAN: Oh, wow. All right.
Orton hands us some little yellow and red tomatoes, the telltale Scarlet Sunrise biclor.
MALONE: All right, ready? Oh, my gosh.
PASHMAN: There's a lot in a little package.
MALONE: Yeah.
PASHMAN: This is not too hard. It's got a bit of a meatiness that's very pleasant, which a good tomato should have, but it still sort of yields to the bite. It's soft and tender, and it's got that sweetness and acidity.
MALONE: That's why he does a food podcast.
(LAUGHTER)
PASHMAN: Now, Rutgers will share about 35% of the Scarlet Sunrise revenue with Orton and Nitzsche.
MALONE: But as it exists now, the Scarlet Sunrise is still pretty expensive to grow. It's likely just a specialty tomato for local growers.
PASHMAN: So it may not yet be part of the national flood of tomatoes with names like Sugar Bombs or Flavor Bombs or Sprinkles.
MALONE: Kenny Malone.
PASHMAN: Or Angel Sweets.
MALONE: That's Dan Pashman.
PASHMAN: There are Cherubs.
MALONE: NPR News.
PASHMAN: And Cloud 9s.
MALONE: They get it, Dan.
PASHMAN: (Laughter). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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