On a recent one When I went to Giant Eagle, my local grocery store in Pittsburgh, I noticed something new in the fruit aisle: a pineapple packaged in pink and green boxes. The image on the front shows the pineapple cut in half, revealing the pink flesh. Dubbed the “jewel of the jungle,” this fruit is the Pinkglow pineapple, a creation of American food giant Fresh Del Monte. It costs $9.99, more than double the price of a regular yellow pineapple.
I put the box in the cart, took a photo with my phone, and shared the find with my foodie friends. I mentioned that its color is a result of change gene— the box was labeled “made possible by bioengineering” — but that didn’t seem to faze anyone. When I brought my Pinkglow to a Super Bowl party, everyone oohed and aahed over the color and then gobbled it up. It’s tastier and less sour than a regular pineapple, and has one more difference: It has the characteristic stem cut off. Soon, my friends also bought pink pineapples. One person used Pinkglow to make homemade tepache, a fermented beverage made from pineapple peels invented in pre-Columbian Mexico.
At a time when orange cauliflower and white strawberries are now popular items in American grocery stores, a pineapple that isn’t yellow doesn’t seem out of place. Still, I wonder: Why the flashy presentation now? And why pink? And why did my friends and I grab it?
When I brought When I posed the question to Hans Sauter, Fresh Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer and senior vice president of R&D and agricultural services, he began by giving me a brief history of the fruit. . You might assume, as I do, that pineapples have always been sweet and sunny – but that wasn’t the case before the 1990s. Store-bought pineapples of the past had green skin, pale yellow flesh, and were often The taste is more sour than sweet. Buying a new one is a gamble. “No one can really tell if the fruit is ripe or not, and pineapple consumption is mainly canned products, because people can trust what they’re going to eat there,” Sauter said. The added sugar in some canned pineapples makes it a sweeter, more consistent product.
In 1996, the company introduced Del Monte Gold Extra Sweet, which was more yellow and less acidic than anything on the market at the time. Pineapple sales skyrocketed and consumer expectations of the fruit changed forever. Gold’s popularity led to an international pineapple feud when fruit rival Dole introduced its own variety. Del Monte sued, alleging that Dole essentially stole its Gold formula. The two companies eventually settled out of court.
With the success of the Golden pineapple, Del Monte is looking for new characteristics that could make the pineapple even more appealing to consumers, Sauter said. But pineapple breeding is a slow process; it can take two years or longer for a tree to produce mature fruit. Del Monte spent 30 years breeding pineapples with certain desirable characteristics before they were ready to market Gold. Sauter said the prospect of waiting another 30 years for a new variety is “unlikely.” So in 2005 the company turned to genetic engineering.
Del Monte didn’t set out to produce a pink pineapple, but at the time, Sauter said, consumers were interested in antioxidant-rich fruits. (Acai bowl and pomegranate juice, anyone?) Pineapple has the ability to naturally convert a pink-red pigment called lycopene, which is high in antioxidants, into the yellow pigment beta-carotene. (Lycopene is what gives tomatoes and watermelons their color.) Blocking this process could then yield pink flesh and higher antioxidants. The company tasked its dedicated pineapple research team with figuring out how to do that.
The team found a trio of modifications to the pineapple genome. They inserted DNA from a tangerine to make it express more lycopene. They added “silencing” RNA molecules to turn off the pineapple’s enzymes that convert lycopene, which also helped reduce its acidity. (RNA silencing is the same technique used to create genetically modified organisms Arctic Apples.) Finally, Del Monte added a gene from tobacco that confers resistance to certain herbicides, although company representatives said this was simply for its scientists to they were able to confirm that other genetic changes had taken effect – not that Del Monte intended to use that herbicide in production.
