Branded fruit: How produce got “Honeycrisp-ified"

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Kenny Malone** (0:15)
This is Planet Money from NPR.
The produce aisle, it is changing. You've noticed this, I'm sure. It is now full of superstar fruits and vegetables. You've got the Honeycrisp Apple, you've got the Cotton Candy Grape, the Cuties Mandarin Orange. They stand out, they cost more, they have branding and sometimes trademarks and patent-ish kinds of protections. To figure out why this change happened and to perhaps discover the next superstar, I hopped in a car and drove to a spot about 30 miles outside of Trenton.

**Dan Pashman** (0:50)
See, Kenny, look at how beautiful New Jersey is.

**Kenny Malone** (0:54)
I am in the car with Dan Pashman, host of the very excellent food podcast, The Sporkful. Dan's a friend of the show, a proud son of New Jersey and unapologetic booster.

**Dan Pashman** (1:04)
Rolling hills, farm, a whole bunch of cows huddled together under a tree to stay in the shade.

**Kenny Malone** (1:10)
Dan did not bring me here for the cows though.

**Dan Pashman** (1:12)
So we're here in the great state of New Jersey to explore tomatoes, which is something New Jersey is famous for. Jersey Fresh, New Jersey Tomatoes.

**Kenny Malone** (1:20)
It sounds like a joke when you say it every time.

**Dan Pashman** (1:23)
Well, I'm here to tell you that it's not a joke.

**Kenny Malone** (1:25)
It is not. In fact, almost a century ago, a scientist at Rutgers University working with the Campbell Soup Company took the already famous New Jersey tomato and developed a new New Jersey tomato that became the tomato.
For a couple decades, if you were eating a tomato, you were very likely eating a descendant of the plump, red, platonic ideal of a tomato that the Rutgers scientists had helped to perfect. That was a slicer style tomato, you know, the big old kind that you slice. A century later, though, Dan has brought me to New Jersey to see a new tomato created at Rutgers. This time, though, a smaller tomato, a grape tomato.

**Dan Pashman** (2:08)
I have to be honest, as excited as I am to learn more about this new tomato, I am skeptical of the real grape tomato. I'm concerned about that.

**Kenny Malone** (2:17)
Now, you know grape tomatoes, oval, pop them in your mouth size little guys that show up in veggie trays all the time. And Dan had heard about this up and coming fancy grape tomato called the Scarlet Sunrise. Now, he obviously loved that it was from New Jersey, loved that Rutgers was involved again. He had, however, failed to mention to me that he thinks that they've chosen the wrong kind of small tomato to invent.

**Dan Pashman** (2:44)
A grape tomato to me is always very hard.
Because it's like almost all firm, hard stuff and very little pulp. To me the cherry tomato, you bite into it, it pops, you get that rush of sweet tart juiciness in your mouth.

**Kenny Malone** (3:00)
Ideally in your mouth and not on your clothes.

**Dan Pashman** (3:03)
Well, I mean, if you're a professional, you put the whole thing in your mouth and close your mouth before you bite. I would take a cherry tomato over a grape tomato.

**Kenny Malone** (3:09)
So when we taste test this thing, are you just going to like crap all over this tomato because you inherently don't like grape tomatoes?

**Dan Pashman** (3:17)
I'm open to my mind being changed. Maybe I just haven't had a good grape tomato.

**Kenny Malone** (3:21)
Okay, all right, well. Now this all assumes we actually get a chance to taste the Scarlet Sunrise because I almost drive past the small Rutgers University experimental farm we're here for in my defense, not the easiest sign and name to spot while driving.

**Dan Pashman** (3:37)
New Jersey Agricultural Equipment Station, Clifford and Melida Snyder Research and Extension Farm.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:43)
I almost drove into the ditch while reading the sign.

**Kenny Malone** (3:47)
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone joined now by New Jersey's most important export, agriculturally, culturally, the one and only Dan Pashman. Hello, Dan.

**Dan Pashman** (3:57)
Hey, Kenny. You can't put me ahead of Bruce, but I'll take Tide with John Bon Jovi.

**Kenny Malone** (4:01)
That's fair. Maybe ahead of tomato.
We will discuss. Because Dan is here to help get to the bottom of this trend that he and I have been calling the honey crispification of seemingly the entire produce aisle.

**Dan Pashman** (4:15)