Taste Is King When Talking Tomatoes

To achieve desired consumer results when developing fruit and vegetable varieties that look, taste, and smell better, David Clark, UF/IFAS professor of environmental horticulture, says the process also involves a concept called psychophysics, which is described as “quantifying the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they effect, such as behavior and emotions.”

Close-up of Garden Gem tomato fruit

Garden Gem
Photo courtesy of UF/IFAS

According to Clark, psychophysics is a way to quantify difficult-to-measure things such as how much you like a color or fragrance. In the end, it provides consumers with what they want.

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“Basically, we conduct psychophysics experiments to determine, without bias, what it is that consumers mentally envision their perfect tomato to be,” he explains. “We usually find there is no one singular tomato that fits the bill for all consumers. Rather, there are usually two to three segments of consumers, and each segment wants a particular type of tomato.”

When Clark says “we,” he is referring to several researchers at UF who are working to gather the specifics on consumer preference. Recently established as a formal center, this group is now called the UF/IFAS Plant Innovation Center.

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Linda Bartoshuk, a UF food science and human nutrition researcher who is part of that group, uses hedonic-based scales, which essentially measure food preferences, to determine what people like in a tomato or other type of fruit.

These scales are different from the traditional scales, Clark explains. “They measure the intensity of flavor and sweetness. These are hard things to measure,” he adds.
Bartoshuk, in turn, works with Charlie Sims in UF’s Food Science Department, and Sims is responsible for conducting human taste panels where they put these new scales to the test.

It is Harry Klee, a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department in UF’s Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, however, who provides dozens of different tomato varieties to the taste panel. As the panelists make their decisions, Klee takes samples of those same tomatoes used by the panel and he extracts all the chemicals, Clark explains.

“[Klee] takes a subset of [the chemicals] and he analyzes the sugars and the acids — the volatiles — everything that has to do with the tongue and the nose,” Clark says. “Using cross-modal statistics, they can look at the biochemical blueprint of those different tomato varieties and relate the biochemistry to what people like.

“By having those two data sets and being able to link them using statistical methods, you can come up with a biochemical recipe for a great tasting tomato,” he continues. “If you apply these same methods to strawberry or blueberries or any other product, you can do the same thing. It is very reproducible.”

In essence, Clark says the researchers can control genes responsible for taste (sugars, acids, volatiles), fragrance (volatiles), and sight (color).

“The key is finding out what people want and putting that together in the perfect combination of traits that will have maximum consumer appeal, then using conventional breeding to deliver it, and molecular tools to help make it happen faster,” he says.

A Gem Of A Tomato

An example of a relatively new tomato variety from the University of Florida’s Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program is Garden Gem. Harry Klee, a professor in the program, developed the tomato as the research team was going through the process of analyzing dozens of different tomato varieties.

Garden Gem tomato plant

Photo courtesy of UF/IFAS

“Klee made crosses between good tasting inbred heirloom tomatoes and productive commercial breeding lines developed at the University of Florida, and came up with a magical hybrid that is early, productive, and extremely flavorful,” says David Clark, UF/IFAS professor of environmental horticulture.

Garden Gem has been out for about two years and Klee said the tomato variety is widely adaptable and performs well in New England, Wisconsin, California, Florida, and Ontario, Canada.

What are the best grower attributes for the variety and how does that compare with what consumers want? “The most important traits for this tomato is that it is early bearing, very prolific, and it tastes great,” Clark says.

The tomato’s diminutive size, however, is a drawback for some larger producers who have reported that the tomato isn’t large enough (less than 2 ounces), which can result in higher labor costs.

“Growers don’t see value in [Garden Gem] because it doesn’t fit into any existing niche,” Klee says. “For the consumer, the attribute is obvious. It tastes better than anything else they can currently purchase.”

According to Clark, the consumer psychophysics work does not give them any real indication that consumers prefer large tomatoes.

“We know from giving out lots of Garden Gem [tomatoes] that once people taste these tomatoes and see how good they are, and how versatile they are in their use, they don’t want anything else,” Clark says. “It is great on a sandwich, in a salad, and processed into marinara and salsa, fresh or processed.”

Klee is currently working on two varieties that are better suited to commercial production. He has a determinate variety for field production and an indeterminate variety suitable for the greenhouse.

The new varieties have not been named yet, Klee explains. “We definitely focus on Florida as the No. 1 production area, but we have had a lot of interest from smaller growers in different parts of the U.S., Canada, and Europe who are interested in the niche markets (restaurants, high-end retail, farmers’ markets) where flavor is the main driver of purchases.”

Klee adds that more extensive trials in multiple locations need to take place before his team of researchers can apply to release them as finished cultivars.
“Most likely that will take us into spring 2016 trials,” he says. “The earliest we can officially release them would be fall of 2016.”

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