Berries Have Never Tasted Better. Here's the Juicy Backstory. --- The world's biggest producer, Driscoll's, had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. The strategy is starting to bear fruit

"Watsonville, Calif. -- The strawberries of America's future are as rich and juicy as the story of how they came to be.

They look resplendent. They taste like candy and fruit punch. They're just firm enough to hold their shape when you bite into one and soft enough that it will melt in your mouth. They're also related to a blueberry halfway across the world that was nearly lost to history.

It's a typically cool morning in Northern California, before the fog makes way for yet another sunny day, when Soren Bjorn grabs, twists and snaps a perfectly ripe strawberry right off the plant. As the chief executive of Driscoll's, the world's largest berry company, he knows everything about the luscious hunk of fruit in his hands -- and he knows that it's something of a miracle.

Every year, the company develops and studies 125,000 strawberry varieties in search of the handful that Driscoll's will sell across the country and around the world. But until recently, one type of strawberry never actually made it to the grocery store.

"We threw out the absolute sweetest, best-tasting berries that we had in our whole gene pool," Bjorn said.

For most of Driscoll's history, the company dumped those mouthwatering strawberries early in the process of bringing a new variety from seedling to grocery shelf. They disappeared because they had some kind of genetic flaw.

For a bunch of reasons, the sweetest berries were among the least viable commercial berries. 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. Bjorn says there's a negative correlation between sweetness and yield, which presented a problem that would take Driscoll's more than a century to solve: Strawberries with more flavor tend to be less abundant.

That is, the most heavenly strawberries weren't thrown away despite their taste. They were thrown away because of their taste.

"But we got excited about all the varieties that we were throwing away," Bjorn said, "and we wondered how much consumers would be willing to pay for the best berry they never got to try."

They decided to find out. Driscoll's is now selling those ultraflavorful strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries under a fitting label: Sweetest Batch.

They're expensive and available only in limited quantities during certain times of the year, but Americans are stretching their berry budgets to buy them.

The U.S. berry market is worth about $9 billion annually, which is up more than 40% over the past five years, according to NielsenIQ. Strawberries are the most popular berry, but the entire category is one of the most promising areas of growth in the entire grocery store. In fact, berries now sell twice as much as any other fruit.

Most shoppers buy regular berries. Others splurge on organic berries. But more are now filling their carts with these luxury berries.

If you want to know how to find them, all you have to do is look at the label -- yellow for conventional berries and green for the organics. If you spot a clamshell with a Driscoll's Sweetest Batch sticker, you're staring at the premium brand, the finest berries of a company that trademarked the phrase "only the finest berries."

A dozen strawberries might set you back $6.99. I've seen 11-ounce containers of blueberries for $10.99 and $12.99 in stores that are right next door to each other. The organic raspberries cost roughly 30% more than a box of conventional raspberries, and a carton of Sweetest Batch raspberries cost another 30% more per pound.

With those different price points and flavor profiles, the berry display has become more like another grocery category.

"I think of it like wine," said Erik Brown, who leads Whole Foods Market's produce procurement.

Sweetest Batch is a tiny part of Driscoll's overall revenue -- for now. It takes between five and seven years to breed a new variety, and the first Sweetest Batch products hit the market five years ago, starting with strawberries and raspberries. They account for about 20% of the privately owned company's blueberry sales, which executives say is a reasonable goal for the entire premium line.

The other goal of the Sweetest Batch program is to boost the quality of all Driscoll's strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. By selecting the berries with the traits they want, they are keeping those genes around for longer, which means every batch will get sweeter.

It might sound obvious that a company in the business of making strawberries decided to make one that tasted better. But in breeding to improve flavor, Driscoll's might as well have declared that it was trying to make strawberries that were fluorescent green.

The idea was so surprisingly counterintuitive that Bjorn himself admits that the Sweetest Batch program was "a little bit of an accident."

"One thing about innovation is that sometimes it's just right in front of you," he said. "Our tendency is to look really far and get all complicated about it. But sometimes, it's really simple. This is the kind of innovation that was right there in front of us, and we didn't know what to do with it."

To find out what they did and how they did it, I visited the drab office park where Driscoll's keeps its headquarters, a short drive from the farms bursting with strawberries and raspberries.

Bjorn was hired by Driscoll's in 2006, climbed the executive ranks and started as CEO this year. We jumped in his car and visited the farms nearby.

He explained that the pivotal moment for the Sweetest Batch program was when one of Driscoll's partners in Australia found a blueberry that was succulent, crunchy and too good to waste. "It tasted amazing," Bjorn said. But it was significantly less productive than less amazing blueberries. "And it would never see the light of day," Bjorn said, "unless we could make it really premium from a price standpoint."

It may have started as an accident, but there was nothing accidental about what happened once they worked out the economics of amazing berries: They took the Sweetest Batch concept and applied it across the berry patch.

There is sticker shock in every part of the grocery store these days. But no matter how much they might cost, Americans continue to inhale berries. They're the rare food that can be eaten for breakfast and for dessert. They're also more snackable than most food -- and most fruit. And they have one of the highest household-penetration rates in the produce aisle, according to NielsenIQ.

Which meant there was an opportunity for a new one.

When the company began exploring the possibility of releasing premium berries, Driscoll's identified promising varieties already in the pipeline, while the company's breeding specialists were given permission to do something they had never done before.

"You can lower your yield requirement," Bjorn said, "if you can get us something that's really, really tasty."

That's the sweet spot for Sweetest Batch berries: acceptable yield and shelf life, incredible flavor.

Every berry is a genetic compromise because selecting for one trait means sacrificing another. In theory, Driscoll's breeders could optimize for a berry that's sweeter than the ones that currently exist. In reality, that berry would probably be so fragile that it would barely get across the street, much less across the country. Even the really, really tasty Sweetest Batch varieties must satisfy Driscoll's criteria for productivity, efficiency and market condition.

That quest for flavor involves Driscoll's sensory analysts, plant pathologists and molecular geneticists. Even top executives have cups of berries waiting at their desk every day for the consumer lab to collect data. And the company gets input from people who have been recruited for their sophisticated palettes: supertasters.

Taste is subjective, but Driscoll's wanted to make it more objective. The company developed a sensory wheel that includes more than 100 different words to describe taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), texture (crunchy, melty, firm, mushy), mouthfeel (juicy, chalky, refreshing, puckering, astringent, effervescent) and flavor and aroma (fruity, candied, floral, herbal).

How a berry looks can also disguise how it tastes. "People eat with their eyes," said Henry Yeung, who leads the company's consumer lab. In fact, when Driscoll's runs experiments on its paler Rose and Tropical Bliss strawberries, it puts taste-tasters in a room with red light and gives them sunglasses with red shades.

It took a while to breed, produce and market the first Sweetest Batch berry, a strawberry variety called Amai that remains in the premium lineup today.

Then came the really hard part: selling it to the most important Driscoll's consumers.

"Mom with kids under the age of 6 who buys organic berries," said Frances Dillard, the company's vice president of marketing.

As a parent, you quickly learn that the only food children eat faster than buttered pasta is $10 worth of berries. I recently took a clamshell of raspberries to dinner with friends and our toddlers, purposefully not mentioning that they were Sweetest Batch or what Sweetest Batch was. As it turned out, you didn't have to know anything about them to devour them.

That night, one mom asked me why the raspberries tasted so good and where I'd gotten them. The next day, her 3-year-old son requested more of the raspberries from yesterday.

Driscoll's works with more than 900 independent growers in 20 countries, including a farm near the company's global headquarters called T-Bone Ranch, where I had the pleasure of picking a glistening raspberry for myself.

It tasted like a raspberry. Or at least what I think a raspberry is supposed to taste like.

"When you've been buying Driscoll's raspberries," Bjorn said, "the likelihood that this is what you've been buying is very high."

Then he pointed to a nearby plant with dangling raspberries and told me to pluck another one.

It tasted unlike any raspberry that I'd ever tried -- because it was a Sweetest Batch raspberry.

It was one of the many, many berries that would be picked by harvesters that day, dropped into boxes, piled into crates, packed onto trucks and chauffeured to a nearby cooling and distribution center owned by Driscoll's. About a week later, they would arrive in New York, where I bought a clamshell of Sweetest Batch raspberries so I could taste them again.

One of the people in charge of developing those raspberries was a Driscoll's breeder named Kyle Rak, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about the breeding and genetics of potato chips before taking his talents to fruit.

Every year, Rak gets a massive data file predicting the outcomes of more than 250,000 possible genetic crosses. He quickly weeds out the ones that won't hit the minimum thresholds for yield, flavor and shelf life, plus the ones that don't have specific markers for disease resistance and sugar production. That whittles the list down to something like 10,000 potential varieties, and Driscoll's can only plant roughly 200 in the test plot. "The breeding program is all about finding outliers," he said.

The first raspberry I tasted at T-Bone Ranch was a variety called Maravilla, which was itself an outlier when it was born nearly 30 years ago. The second raspberry I tried made the almighty Maravilla seem less wondrous. That one was named Reyna.

Queen.

Rak identified Reyna as a Sweetest Batch candidate from the very beginning. At first, he was struck by its looks. "The structure of the drupelets is, like, perfect," he said. "Architecturally, it's like a Roman arch." Before long, the variety was climbing his flavor rankings. Every berry that Driscoll's breeds starts as one plant, a bet that won't pay out for a very long time -- if it ever does. But he felt confident about Reyna when it was a single plot in a field.

"I just knew it," Rak said. "I have it written in my records: This is the one!"

It's now the one he sees whenever he walks into a supermarket and peeks inside a clamshell of Sweetest Batch raspberries.

"Oh yeah," he thinks. "That's Reyna."

These days, he's thinking about the next generation of raspberries that will dethrone Reyna. They're so early in the breeding process that they're still known only by coded strings of numbers and letters. But they're already beating Reyna in sensory tests.

By the time this sweeter batch is ready for commercial production, Reyna will get downgraded and eventually be known by another name." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Science of Success: Berries Have Never Tasted Better. Here's the Juicy Backstory. --- The world's biggest producer, Driscoll's, had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. The strategy is starting to bear fruit. Cohen, Ben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 July 2024: B.1.