Global seed breeder Enza Zaden has launched a tomato campaign, Timing Taste, with the aim of uniting the salad sector together across the UK and continental Europe in producing tomatoes with more flavour.
Enza Zaden Benelux director Henk Haitsma announced the company’s new direction to more than 100 of its grower customers, as well as marketing companies and European retailers, at research and information centre Tomato World in Honselerdijk, the Netherlands, on Tuesday.
This was the first in a series of announcements, with the next to take place at Enza Zaden’s House Fair in Spain next week.
The Timing Taste experience will also be the focus of the company’s stand at Fruit Logistica in Berlin next February.
Enza Zaden believes that as a global seed breeder it is well placed to predict consumer trends and has received a number of indications that taste and flavour will drive tomato consumption in Europe in the future. As part of the Timing Taste campaign, the company will use its knowledge and expertise to improve existing growers’ tomatoes. Once new tomato varieties have been bred, the Timing Taste campaign will encourage the industry to come together to promote and market the new tomatoes.
Chris Groot of Enza Zaden told FPJ at the event: “This is the beginning of a journey. Consumers want tasty tomatoes more than anything, so we are going to go to the next step and focus on that. We were the first seed company to focus on taste in 1988 with a taste programme for tomatoes and we think it is time for the next step, which is why we have created this platform of Timing Taste so we can take our customers on this journey with us.
“We are going to do this by integrating new technology to identify taste characteristics. In this way, Enza Zaden will have a more efficient natural breeding process. This and the Timing Taste platform will shorten the time to market of future tasty varieties.
“We are here today to find out which growers, whether they are Dutch, Spanish or British, are supportive of this and want to get behind our vision. The following step is to sit down with the growers to start looking at the opportunities in the market.
“Seed breeders are the first link in the chain and supermarkets are the last; we all need to work together to give consumers what they want,” added Groot.
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