AI Summary
5 min readBranded fruit: How produce got “Honeycrisp-ified"
On a muddy experimental farm in New Jersey, two retired Rutgers researchers—Pete Nitzsche and Tom Orton—are showing NPR's Kenny Malone and food podcast host Dan Pashman rows of tomato plants. The prize is a new grape tomato called the Scarlet Sunrise, a bicolor yellow-and-red fruit bred to be sweet, visually distinctive, and hardy enough for commercial growers. Dan, a self-described grape tomato skeptic who finds most of them "very hard" with "very little pulp," is here to taste-test. But the real story is bigger than one tomato. It is about why the produce aisle has exploded with branded, trademarked, premium-priced fruits and vegetables—what Dan calls the "Honeycrisp-ification" of produce.
The legal shifts that made branded fruit possible
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:01) **The Produce Aisle is Changing** - Kenny introduces the phenomenon of branded, trademarked "superstar" fruits and vegetables like Honeycrisp apples and Cotton Candy grapes.
- 2 (01:04) **The Quest for the Scarlet Sunrise Tomato** - Dan brings Kenny to Rutgers to see a new grape tomato called the Scarlet Sunrise, but Dan admits he is a skeptic of grape tomatoes in general.
- 3 (03:32) **The "Honeycrispification" of Produce** - Kenny and Dan frame the episode around the broader trend of creating premium, branded produce varieties.
- 4 (05:56) **Meeting the Tomato Breeders** - Kenny and Dan meet Tom Orton and Pete Nitzsche, the Rutgers scientists who created the Scarlet Sunrise.
- 5 (09:27) **Change #1: The 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act** - Kenny explains the first major legal change that enabled the branded produce boom.
- 6 (10:28) **Change #2: The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act** - Kenny describes the second key legal change that supercharged university agricultural research.
- 7 (11:17) **Change #3: The Honeycrisp Apple (1991)** - Kenny points to the Honeycrisp as the first major breakout star of this new system.
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Show Notes
And now – it’s happening in the tomato bin too! Where once there were just plain old cherry or grape tomatoes, now there are Sugar Bombs, and Flavor Bombs, and Lolli Bombs and Sprinkles.
Today, we are partnering up with Dan Pashman – host of The Sporkful food podcast – and heading to New Jersey where we hope to taste an up-and-coming competitor: Rutgers University's Scarlet Sunrise grape tomato. We talk to the inventors to understand why this explosion in branded fruits and veggies has happened and how you go about making a new piece of produce.
Plus, we talk to Cornell agricultural economist Miguel Gomez about whether or not the fruits and veggies spread in our produce aisle are, perhaps, reaching the point of market saturation.
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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Dan Pashman. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo & Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
Correction, Aug. 31, 2026: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that the University of Washington developed the Cosmic Crisp apple. It was Washington State University.
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