A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Florida is working to create fruits, vegetables and plants that consumers want through consumer-assisted selection.
“The idea of giving people want they want is really important to us,” says David Clark, a University of Florida professor of environmental horticulture. Clark, who spoke at the American Seed Trade Association’s 2015 Vegetable & Flower Seed Conference, adds that while consumers have diverse choices, plant breeders and the seed industry also have diverse genetics.
The way we go about producing these fruits and vegetables has an impact all the way down the supply chain, Clark says, explaining that production methods, shipping and handling, and packaging and processing must all be taken into consideration.
“We have to be able to breed for mechanical harvesting, evenly maturing produce, post-harvest longevity and to fit into containers — all at the same time,” he says. The good thing, Clark says, is that plant breeders have amazing tools right now.
Project team members include Harry Lee, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an expert in tomato flavor; Linda Bartoshuk, also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the person who measures hard to measure things such as how much a person likes a flavor; and Charlie Sims, who runs the food testing facility. Sims develops the scales on how to measure hard to measure things and puts them to test, Clark says.
Clark and his team are using science to give consumers what they want. So how does this group of researchers know what consumers want? “Most people really don’t know what they want,” Clark says. “It’s very hard to measure emotion; it’s even harder to measure how much more people will pay if stimulated.”
For example, Clark says his team learned that consumers are stimulated by house plants because they help to clean the air, look good and are easy to care for. However, he says, consumers are not willing to pay for clean air but they are for aesthetics and hardiness.
This is where psychophysics comes into the equation. Clark defines psychophysics as quantifying the relationship between how much you like a characteristic or product and how much you are willing to spend on that characteristic or product.
Clark says his team gets people to go online to participate in the psychophysics experiments. Essentially participants get three or four descriptors in 96 random combinations at a rapid-fire pace, he says, noting that this prevents any room for biases to creep in.
“We can do these studies with 300 consumers in a week,” Clark says. “So we decided we can make a better tasting, more valuable tomato. We took 79 heirloom tomato varieties and 65 more common varieties and extracted 68 flavor constituents — sugars, acids and a bunch of different volatiles.
“We had a 170 people on average taste all of them and rate them on litmus scales for taste, flavor and palatability. And what we did was take the statistics on human liking and did a correlation statistics to association statistics to develop models to explain consumer preferences. What I mean is we have now been able to connect what the consumer likes to the biochemical recipe.”
Clark says consumers want a tomato with a sweet, classic flavor that is prolific fruiting and early-season fruiting, deep red and called Garden Gem. He says that was the recipe for breeders.
“That’s what people want from a garden tomato and they don’t even know that this is what they want,” Clark says.
For more information about Clark’s work and the University of Florida’s Plant Innovation Program, visit http://hort.ifas.ufl.edu/pip/aboutpip.shtml.
