The World’s First Purple Tomato

February 27th, 2024

   We’ve had purple- and dark-blue-skinned tomatoes for years now, but this month marks the arrival of the world’s first tomato that’s a true, dark purple throughout.

The Purple Tomato is purple throughout, not just at the skin level.
Credit: Norfolk Healthy Produce

   For now at least, it’s called simply The Purple Tomato, and it’s a bioengineered cherry-type tomato that gets its purple coloring from the genes of a purple snapdragon.

   That’s what makes this variety particularly ground-breaking – it’s the first time a genetically modified food crop is being marketed directly to consumers. Up to now, so-called GMO crops have been grown by commercial producers.

   Norfolk Healthy Produce, the California start-up that’s the sole source of The Purple Tomato, began selling seeds to home gardeners earlier this month. They’re priced at $20 for a pack of 10 and available only through Norfolk’s website.

   What remains to be seen is how well the idea goes over since a large chunk of the American product is leery about bioengineered/GMO foods.

   Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has found no ill effects from eating bioengineered foods, slightly more than half of Americans have GMO health concerns, according to a 2020 Pew Research survey.

   British biochemist Cathie Martin started work on The Purple Tomato 20 years ago by identifying a gene that gave a snapdragon its purple flowers. She then used a bacteria to insert the genetics into tomato plants.

   The effort got a green light last year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

   “We aim to show that there’s a lot of benefits that can go to consumers through biotechnology – better taste and better nutrition as prime examples,” Norfolk’s CEO Nathan Pumplin told National Public Radio’s Morning Edition program.

   Besides the novel color, The Purple Tomato was developed with an eye on boosting tomatoes’ antioxidant ability. Antioxidants have anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties.

   According to a Norfolk press release, The Purple Tomato has the usual tomato amount of lycopene but is also high in anthocyanin – up to the level of anthocyanin champs blueberries and blackberries.

   Martin’s work earned her a 2022 Rank Prize for Nutrition for “outstanding research into plant genetics and metabolism leading to enhanced nutritional qualities of fruits and vegetables.”

   She was also part of a 2008 study published in the journal Nature that showed that mice who ate a diet supplemented with the snapdragon-enhanced purple tomatoes lived 30 percent longer.

   Besides the boosted nutrition, The Purple Tomato is also supposed to be a good-taster and have a long shelf life.

   I’ll let you know about that because as a gardening guinea pig, I’m a sucker for most anything new and different. I ordered my $20 pack and plan to test-grow a few Purple Tomato plants in my garden this summer.

   Norfolk says the seeds are open-pollinated ones, meaning they can be saved to produce new seedlings with similar traits as the parent (in this case, purple-fruited newbies).

   If you’re not sure you want to dabble in the world of GMOs but like the sound of purple tomatoes, some dark-skinned varieties that are the result of traditional cross-breeding include Indigo Rose, Dancing with Smurfs, Black Beauty, Purple Boy, Purple Calabash, Midnight Snack, and Midnight Roma.