Hearty Hybrids
24 July 06
Seed companies
have been creating hybrids and selling them to farmers for a very long
time -- well over a century. In 1890, for example, the American Seed
Trade Association counted almost 600 companies as members.
These companies
have always competed based on new products – each year, new seed
varieties would supplement and supplant the old ones.
Until recently,
most seed companies created hybrids to appeal to the needs of
their direct customers, like farmers, or of their customers’ customers,
like distributors. So seed companies sold corn that could be grown at
lower cost, or tomatoes that had thicker skins, enabling easier
transportation.
Now many of
these companies have begun to talk to the final customers – the
supermarket shoppers who buy the fruits and vegetables that are produced
by the farmers who buy their seeds. As a result, seed companies have
developed a whole range of new hybrids, from tomatoes which contain
cancer-fighting anti-oxidants to new shapes of lettuce and smaller,
seedless watermelons.
Borrowing from
ingredient branding as practiced by Intel, NutraSweet, or Gore-Tex,
there are now fresh fruits and vegetables that are known by their
(patented) seed type.
Both Seminis
(recently purchased by Monsanto) and Syngenta are large global seed
companies. The technology they are using to drive this proliferation of
products is not genetic modification, which has run into numerous
regulatory setbacks, but rather hybridization.
The basics of
hybridization have been established for centuries. Now, thanks to DNA
technology, seed companies can create fruits and vegetables with a
variety of unusual traits, including unique colors, tastes, and,
perhaps, health benefits.
As a result, the
produce aisles in grocery stores as varied as Whole Foods, Casino, and
Wal-Mart are full of new products with a range of new features.
And we haven’t
even gotten to the tomatoes yet…
Be on the
lookout for the Seminis seedless tomato, coming soon to a supermarket
near you. Seminis scientist Doug Heath is working on it, as well as on
a variety of other tomato improvements and line extensions, at his five
acre trial field in Woodland Hills, California.
30 varieties of tomatoes at the Berkeley Bowl
The Berkeley
Bowl, a 30-year-old
grocery store and institution in Berkeley, California, sells more than
30 varieties of tomatoes. Prices average about $2.49 a pound, easily
twice the price of the more common tomato varieties.
"You can't make a buck if you don't have something distinctive”
Stephen Griffin, president of Misionero Vegetables, a large lettuce
grower in Salinas, Ca., in BusinessWeek, 24 July 06
These higher
prices provide plenty of incentive for everybody from the farmer to the
grocer.
The real
winners, though, are the seed companies. Because seeds of these hybrids
can’t be reproduced, farmers have to come back to the seed companies
each year in order to grow the distinctive varieties that give them
higher prices.
The phrase “The
Long Tail” (as a proper noun with capitalization) was first coined by
Chris Anderson in 2004. His recent book of the same name makes the
point that internet businesses, like Amazon.com or Netflix, can thrive
by selling small quantitities of specialized goods to many small
markets.
This “Long Tail”
phenomenon is not limited to cyberspace. You can see it as well in the
wide variety of high-priced hybrids in the produce aisle of your grocery
store.
More
Information:
-
BusinessWeek’s
24 July 06 issue had an article about the new hybrids. If you’re a
subscriber, you can read it
here.
-
The company
history of Syngenta is
here.
-
Michael
Pollan wrote an article about the economics of hybrid seeds back in
1994. You can read it
here.
-
The material
on Seminis and the seedless tomato was reported in The New York
Times on 28 Aug 05. Here’s a
link.
-
The 1890
reference to seed trade associations comes from
Intellectual Property Rights and the Life Science Industries: A
Twentieth Century History
By Graham Dutfield. Thank you, Google Books.
