WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE. You buy a supermarket cantaloupe, cut it up, take a bite and start chewing. You’d hoped for a juicy, succulent, flavorful fruit. Instead, the experience is akin to trying to eat a piece of wood — one that kind of tastes like cantaloupe. Lack of flavor in supermarket varieties of melon and other cucurbits is a hot topic WHAT’S SO COMPLICATED ABOUT A CANTALOUPE? PLENTY Researchers from around the world are working to bolster the hardiness and quality of cucurbits. Marc Zienkiewicz mzienkiewicz@issuesink.com right now in the breeding community, so much so that a keynote speaker at the recent Cucurbitaceae 2018 conference at the University of California, Davis, was someone for whom bringing the flavor back to supermarket cantaloupe has been a major project. Victor Verlage, senior director of resilient sourcing for Walmart, delivered an opening address that focused heavily on working with the seed community to deliver new varieties of melon to consum- ers. A big focus of his talk was the Sweet Spark cantaloupe, developed by Walmart and Bayer, and now sold in more than 1,300 Walmart stores in the United States. 30 / SEEDWORLD.COM FEBRUARY 2019 Sweet Spark is sweeter than other cantaloupe sold at the supermarket. While regular melons have excellent shelf life and growers like them because they yield well and are disease resistant, they lack in flavor, Verlage said. “For the past 15 years, cantaloupe has been losing ground among our custom- ers,” he said. “Year over year, our canta- loupe sales continued to decline. “Consumer insights show that prod- uct attributes, especially flavor, need to change in order for Walmart customers to start buying cantaloupe again. We need to delight palates.” Enter the cucurbit research community. The hunt for new genetics that get turned into varieties like Sweet Spark is heating up, and cucurbit researchers and breed- ers are positioned to deliver on what the marketplace is after by “bringing back” the flavor to cucurbits such as cantaloupe. But, it’s not an easy task. Sweet Spark was years in development, and varieties like it don’t typically come with the sky-high yields, ease of harvest and the long shelf life of traditional supermarket varieties. Breeding Constraints “Flavor in vegetables used to be much more common in heirlooms, because indi- vidual people were much more engaged in the whole breeding process, saving seed from what they enjoyed,” explained Michael Mazourek, a vegetable breeder at Cornell University who sat on the scientific committee for Cucurbitaceae 2018. “As agriculture has gone to a global model, we have developed these com- modity classes that constrain diversity. “Once you constrain the diversity, there are only so many things you can