Why Strawberries Are Like Tomatoes

Selling fruit in supermarkets, farmers, face a special set of challenges. They have to worry about shelf life, color, and transport.

Consequently, a strawberry is rather like a tomato.

Tomato and Strawberry Research

Tomato Research

Our story starts with a red tomato. Close to 90 years ago, a tomato grower noticed that one of her (his?) tomato plants ripened evenly. Lacking the green shoulders of most tomatoes, it was firm, red, and round.

The new tomato was named and released in 1930 by the Fargo, North Dakota agricultural experiment station. Called the All Red, it soon became a grower’s dream and a consumer staple. Bred for firmness, size, disease resistance, and color, after World War II, the All Red dominated commercial tomato farming. The only problem was taste. By eliminating the fruit’s green shoulders, farmers had also cut the sugar content that came from the plant’s chloroplasts.

Now, strawberry researchers wrestle with the same challenges.

Strawberry Research

Driscoll’s, the “world’s largest berry company” figured out how to give us a pretty strawberry with okay taste. Because all berries with better taste were less resilient and less abundant, they were not available. “They were too soft, too susceptible to disease or their shelf life was too short. They weren’t red enough for consumers or efficient enough for harvesters. Or there weren’t enough of them.” Or, as a Driscoll’s CEO said, “We threw out the absolute sweetest, best-tasting berries that we had in our whole gene pool…”

Now though, Driscoll’s decided there is a market for the best berries. They just need to charge more.

Our Bottom Line: Supply and Demand

As economists, we can say it is all supply and demand.

On the supply side, the All Red tomato and most Driscoll strawberries are more disease resistant, easier to ship, and longer lasting. On the demand side, supermarket shoppers selected affordable fruit that looked appealing. The price at which quantity demanded met quantity supplied satisfied both sides of the market.

Now, Driscoll’s seems to be targeting a second sweeter market:

My sources and more: Thanks to WSJ for inspiring today’s post.  Meanwhile these LiveScience and Science articles told the story of the red tomato. Please note that today’s red tomato story was in previous econlife posts.