Flavor Comes Last

Have you ever had a tomato that looked perfect but tasted like nothing? You wouldn't be alone: 217,000 webpages complain about tasteless tomatoes and another 66,000 write on flavorless tomatoes. In an era of consumer sovereignty, this seems a little odd. Why do we spend $4 billion [USDA] on tomatoes if we don't like their flavor?

Maybe it's all in our minds? Reggie Brown of the Florida Tomato Committee says, "Everybody has an emotional attachment with a tomato they've grown and the memory of that taste," Brown says. "If you hold me to the standard of the tomato that you're emotionally attached to, I'll never meet that standard. You can't beat a memory." [USA Today] Mr. Brown puts a clever spin on the question, but I'd bet most people could identify a good tomato in a blind taste test.

We usually don't buy produce via a blind tasting. Instead, we use appearance to judge quality. Is the tomato rotten? Is it soft and wrinkled? How's the color? Are there bad spots? Was it smashed in shipping? If it's bad, we don't buy.

Producers respond by providing us with tomatoes that are unblemished, shiny, round, and uniformly red. Flavor? Flavor literally comes last. It isn't observable until after we buy and then it's too late. The firms' incentives are to produce perfect-looking tomatoes that ship well.

Growers typically harvest tomatoes while they are green and hard, since green tomatoes are more durable than tender vine-ripened fruit. Ethylene gas can turn green tomatoes red, but their taste and texture usually doesn't match a ripe tomato. The result: hundreds of thousands of unsatisfied customers.

Could a firm produce good-tasting tomatoes and profit from this market failure? Maybe. There's certainly a business opportunity there. But they can only be successful if consumers are able to identify the tasty tomatoes. So the question becomes, how can growers signal that they have a better tomato?

Branding is common way to differentiate consumer products, but it's generally difficult to brand vegetables in a meaningful way. One big Florida producer came up with an interesting solution-- grow better tasting tomatoes that look different from the usual tomato. Ordinary commercial tomatoes look perfect, so in order to differentiate, they market the UglyRipe tomato. UglyRipe is a beefsteak tomato with lumps and bumps that visually distinguish it from the typical supermarket tomato. The Florida Tomato Committee (a Depression-era institution that controls the winter tomato market) suppressed the UglyRipe for several years until a 2007 USDA ruling allowed it to be shipped out of state. [CBS]

It's not really the ugliness that makes this tomato tastier. The same tomato, picked hard green, would be flavorless. Ripe is the key in UglyRipe. The lumpiness is simply a marker for the investment in flavor quality that this producer made. They aren't alone. Selling tomatoes on the vine is another visually distinctive method of identifying an invisible attribute. The vine itself doesn't contribute to the flavor.

It's late summer in the southern hemisphere, so I'm able to get ripe local tomatoes at the Farmers' markets in Uruguay, but next year when I'm back in Kalamazoo I'll be looking for branded tomatoes. If you get a chance to try them sooner, let me know.