09.20.2009 • SUNDAY • M 1 ST.

LOUIS POST-DISPATCH • A7

FOOD

VEGETABLES • FROM A1

The company hopes to use its expertise in plant genetics and biotechnology to take advantage of increasing vegetable consumption

Monsanto is spending about
$75 million developing new veg-
etable seeds. Much of its budget
still goes to traditional and ad-
vanced breeding. With few ex-
ceptions, it’s not investing in
genetically modified varieties,
which involve introducing new
genes to make plants resistant to
pests or herbicide.
Woodland is the largest of
60 vegetable breeding stations
around the globe. It’s home to
about 180 breeders, patholo-
gists and other scientists. Offices,
labs and 290,000 square feet of
greenhouses are surrounded by
fields brimming with new and
novel varieties of tomatoes, pep-
pers, onions, squash and melons.
Take the small, bright orange
grape tomato known simply as
No. 3756.
To most people, it doesn’t look
different from what you might
find today at the grocery store.
Its creator, tomato breeder Doug
Heath, believes it’s destined to
become a hit with consumers, re-
tailers and growers — all of which
will mean an opportunity to jus-
tify higher seed prices.
On a tour of the tomato plot on
a sunny mid-August morning,
Heath walks down a 100-foot-
long row of plants full of bright
orange tomatoes that stand out
like lights on a Christmas tree.
The tomato is characterized
by several key traits. It contains
a specific “long shelf life” gene
that helps it stay fresh as it travels
thousands of miles to stores. It’s
resistant to Tomato Mosaic Virus,
a scourge for greenhouse grow-
ers. But mostly, it’s higher in Brix,
or sweetness. A slicing tomato
measures about 5 degrees Brix; a
typical cherry or grape tomato is
8. This one registers near 12.
“This is a favorite of my kids,”
Heath says, plucking one of the
bulbs and popping it in his mouth.
“Absolutely kid-proven. If I bring
these home, they eat them like
Skittles.”
Heath and many of the other
scientists at Woodland are hold-
overs from Seminis Inc., which
was already the world’s largest
vegetable seed company when
Monsanto bought it for $1.5 bil-
lion in 2005.
The company added to its seed
empire last year with the $800
million purchase of Netherlands-
based De Ruiter Seeds Group BV,
which specializes in seeds for
greenhouse vegetables, a fast-
growing and more profitable seg-
ment of the business.
HEALTHIER TOMATOES
Monsanto was developing po-
tatoes, tomatoes and berries,
including genetically modified
varieties, in the late 1990s. The
company left that business a few
years later.
Executives never lost interest,
though.A few years later they saw
an opportunity to leverage the
company’s expertise in plant ge-
netics and biotechnology to take
advantage of increasing global
vegetable consumption.
Vegetables are still a tiny piece
of Monsanto’s business. Sales to-
taled $744 million in fiscal 2008,
just 7 percent of total revenue.
Overall, it sells more than 3,000
products in 156 countries, mostly
to seed dealers and distributors.
Monsanto aims to boost veg-
etable seed sales to $1 billion by
2012 by focusing on consumer
traits such as flavor and nutri-
tion. That’s a new tack for seed
companies, which historically
poured their energy into boost-
ing yields and creating produce
that resisted disease. Sometimes,
those grower traits came at the
expense of flavor.
New products include Dolce
Verde, a lettuce that combines
the sweetness and crunch of ice-
berg and the dark color and nu-
tritional qualities of romaine. It’s
being sold at 800 Tesco super-
markets in the United Kingdom,
and the company hopes to bring
it to the United States.
A new sweet onion will be test-
marketed in St. Louis around
Thanksgiving. It’s meant to fill
the seasonal gap that exists when
Vidalia onions aren’t available.
Other new products are aimed
squarely at nutrition, such as
high-lycopene tomatoes and
broccoli that the company claims
contains more cancer-fighting
compounds than varieties avail-
able today.
“When I talk to people who
are leading nutritionists and ask
them what we should do to make
fruits and vegetables healthier,
the real consensus I get is to make
them taste better so that people
will eat more,” said David M.
Stark, Monsanto’s vice president
of consumer traits.
Booming demand for antioxi-
dant-rich “superfoods” such as
blueberries and pomegranates
are examples of consumer in-
terest in healthy foods, said Mi-
chael O’Brien, vice president of
produce and floral for St. Louis-
based Schnuck Markets Inc.
“Those two items resonated
with people,” said O’Brien, who
is part of a group advising Mon-
santo through his position as sec-
retary-treasurer of the Produce
Marketing Association.
Monsanto is also forging rela-
tionships with companies such
as produce giant Dole Food Co.
The companies announced a
five-year agreement this year to
develop healthier, better-tasting
broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and
spinach.
Sano Shimoda, president and
founder of Bioscience Securities
Inc., an advisory and investment
banking firm in Venice, Calif.,
believes the goal of such alliances
is to create brands that will fetch a
premium from consumers.
“If you can create differenti-
ated products coming off the
farm, then there’s the opportu-
nity to create brand identification
that is tied to traits,” he said.“The
whole point is: How can they cre-
ate product identification that
the consumer will pay for, that
will create brand identity and that
they can charge more for?”
But knowing what consum-
ers want today is only part of the
challenge. It can take years to
develop a new tomato, melon or
pepper. And tastes vary widely
by geography. Consider toma-
toes: Italians want an acidic to-
mato. Japanese want a pinkish,
sweet fruit without a hint of
acid. Americans generally prefer
something in between.
Processed food companies and
fast-food restaurants also have
different demands.
“McDonald’s doesn’t want
a perfectly round tomato. They
want a uniform red tomato like a
sausage, so that every slice is al-
most the same,” said John Uhlig,
who runs Monsanto’s food qual-
ity lab at Woodland. “And when
they make ketchup, they want a
different tomato. You’ve almost
got a moving target.”
ACCELERATING NATURE
Uhlig’s lab resembles a science
classroom. Stacks of brown plas-
tic bins holding basketball-size
watermelons sit on the floor,
waiting to be tested to see how
they withstand the cold (typi-
cally, they don’t).
On a table around the corner,
clear plastic containers of slicing
tomatoes are arranged on cafete-
ria trays. Each box holds three or
four pre-sliced tomatoes picked
days earlier. The goal: to mimic
how they’ll hold up when they
arrive at a deli or a fast-food res-
taurant.
Over the course of a year, the
lab will handle 58,000 pounds of
produce, running tests on sugars,
acidity and pungency. In all, more
than 330,000 individual items
will be bar-coded and tested for
various physical and chemical
properties.
Much of the work is still done
by hand, as are other time-con-
suming chores at Woodland,
such as pollinating tiny green-
house plants.
Meanwhile, much of the head-
spinning genetic analysis that’s
become an integral part of the
company’s plant-breeding pro-
gram has been revolutionized by
proprietary automated systems.
The speed and efficiency is a
key to Monsanto’s increased use
of a powerful biotech tool — the
use of molecular markers, DNA
fragments used to identify ge-
netic features of plants.
So far, Monsanto researchers
have identified more than 15,000
such markers across a dozen key
crops, such as tomatoes, peppers
and melons,that can significantly
accelerate the breeding process.
Take a cherry tomato devel-
oped by Heath. It was bred with
a wild species indigenous to Peru
to make it resistant to late blight
disease, a fungal disease that has
wreaked havoc on some tomato
crops this year.
In the past, crossing a domes-
ticated tomato with a wild spe-
cies would have taken a decade.
With markers, the time can be cut
to as little as two to three years,
Heath said.
“It’s almost like having X-ray
glasses,” he said. “My assistant
takes a millimeter sliver of leaf,
extracts the DNA, and we have
many markers we can look at.”
Monsanto has earned billions
of dollars selling genetically en-
gineered corn and soybean, and
it even markets transgenic squash
developed by Seminis in 1995
that’s resistant to certain plant
viruses. Yet, the company doesn’t
have aggressive plans to launch
new GM fruit or vegetables in the
near future.
The company’s first foray into
biotech vegetables was the New-
Leaf potato, which contained a
gene from a microorganism that
produced a toxin to repel the Col-
orado potato beetle — a damag-
ing pest for growers.
At its peak, the potato was
planted on 55,000 acres.But fast-
food giant McDonald’s instructed
french fry suppliers to stop us-
ing the potato. Many farmers fol-
lowed suit,and Monsanto shelved
it in 2001.
Today, Monsanto said it was
investing in only a handful of
biotech products. One is an in-
sect-protected and herbicide-
tolerant sweet corn that it hopes
to introduce in the United States
within the next decade to com-
pete against a product offered by
rival Syngenta.
A partner in India, Mahyco,
has commercialized insect-pro-
tected brinjal, or eggplant, for
that country. Now Monsanto is
considering launching the trait in
its own line of GM brinjal seeds.
The projects are evidence that
Monsanto continues to believe
biotech traits hold promise for
consumers and growers.
But the scientific and business
obstacles for successfully com-
mercializing a genetically modi-
fied vegetable is steep, said Doug
Gurian-Sherman, a senior scien-
tist in the Food and Environment
Program at the Union of Con-
cerned Scientists in Washington.
Perhaps the steepest hurdle is
getting consumers to accept it.
“The concept still is somewhat
troubling to people,” he said.

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