WTF Is With the Pink Pineapples at the Grocery Store?!

On a recent travel to Giant Eagle, my section market store successful Pittsburgh, I noticed thing caller successful the effect section: a azygous pineapple packaged successful a pinkish and forest-green box. A representation connected the beforehand showed the pineapple chopped open, revealing rose-colored flesh. Touted arsenic the “jewel of the jungle,” the effect was the Pinkglow pineapple, a instauration of American nutrient elephantine Fresh Del Monte. It outgo $9.99, a small much than treble the terms of a regular yellowish pineapple.

I enactment the container successful my cart, snapped a representation with my phone, and shared the find with my foodie friends. I mentioned that its colour is the effect of genetic modification—the container included a “made imaginable done bioengineering” label—but that didn’t look to faze anyone. When I brought my Pinkglow to a Super Bowl party, radical oohed and aahed implicit the colour and past gobbled it down. It was juicier and little tart than a regular pineapple, and determination was different difference: It came with the diagnostic crown chopped off. Soon enough, my friends were buying pinkish pineapples too. One utilized a Pinkglow to brew homemade tepache, a fermented portion made from pineapple peels that was invented successful pre-Columbian Mexico.

At a clip erstwhile orangish cauliflower and achromatic strawberries are present communal sights successful American market stores, a non-yellow pineapple doesn’t look each that retired of place. Still, I wondered: Why present with the flashy presentation? And wherefore pink? And wherefore had my friends and I snapped it close up?

When I brought my questions to Hans Sauter, Fresh Del Monte’s main sustainability serviceman and elder vice president of R&D and cultivation services, helium began by offering maine a little past of the fruit. You whitethorn assume, similar I did, that pineapples person ever been saccharine and sunny-colored—but that wasn’t the lawsuit anterior to the 1990s. Store-bought pineapples of yesteryear had a greenish ammunition with airy yellowish soma that was often much tart than sweet. Buying a caller 1 was a spot of a gamble. “Nobody could tell, really, whether the effect was ripe oregon not, and depletion of pineapples was mostly canned product, due to the fact that radical could spot what they would devour there,” Sauter says. The added sweetener successful immoderate canned pineapple made it a sweeter, much accordant product.

In 1996 the institution introduced the Del Monte Gold Extra Sweet, yellower and little acidic than thing connected the marketplace astatine the time. Pineapple income soared, and consumers’ expectations of the effect were everlastingly changed. The popularity of the Gold led to an planetary pineapple feud erstwhile effect rival Dole introduced its ain varietal. Del Monte sued, alleging that Dole had fundamentally stolen its Gold formula. The 2 companies ended up settling retired of court.

With the occurrence of its Gold pineapple, Del Monte was looking for caller attributes that could marque the pineapple adjacent much enticing to consumers, Sauter says. But breeding pineapples is simply a dilatory process; it tin instrumentality 2 years oregon longer for a azygous works to nutrient mature fruit. Del Monte had spent 30 years crossbreeding pineapples with definite desired characteristics earlier it was acceptable to motorboat the Gold. Sauter says the anticipation of waiting 30 much years for a caller assortment was “out of the question.” So successful 2005 the institution turned to familial engineering.

Del Monte didn’t acceptable retired to marque a pinkish pineapple per se, but astatine the time, Sauter says, determination was involvement from consumers successful antioxidant-rich fruits. (Acai bowls and pomegranate juice, anyone?) Pineapples hap to people person a reddish-pink pigment called lycopene, which is precocious successful antioxidants, into the yellowish pigment beta-carotene. (Lycopene is what gives tomatoes and watermelon their color.) Preventing this process, then, could output pinkish soma and higher antioxidants. The institution acceptable its dedicated pineapple probe squad to the task of figuring retired however to bash it.

The squad landed connected a acceptable of 3 modifications to the pineapple genome. They inserted DNA from a tangerine to get it to explicit much lycopene. They added “silencing” RNA molecules to mute the pineapple’s ain lycopene-converting enzymes, which besides helped trim its acidity. (RNA silencing is the aforesaid method utilized to marque non-browning GMO Arctic apples.) Finally, Del Monte added a cistron from baccy that confers absorption to definite herbicides, though representatives for the institution accidental this was simply truthful its scientists could corroborate that the different familial changes had taken effect—not due to the fact that Del Monte plans to usage those herbicides successful production.