Purple Magic, a new breed of Northern Irish potato, has reached the final of Invent 2016, a competition for innovation that’s usually dominated by tech projects.
The new potato has been developed by Northern Ireland’s Agri-Food and Bioscience Institute (AFBI). It is currently available in North American markets, but seed production, recipe development and antioxidant analysis is currently underway prior to development of the European market.
The Invent Awards 2016 is run by the Northern Ireland Science Park Connect organisation to find Northern Ireland's next breakthrough invention. Entrants have competed through rounds of pitches assessed by independent expert judges to win a share of the £33,000 prize fund, access to their global network and a place on a forthcoming Northern Ireland Tech Mission to California.
The winners will be announced in September.
AFBI Scientist Paul Watts used innovative scientific methods to elevate disease resistance and tolerance to stress within the potato breeding programme over the last 30 years.
With a growing awareness of the positive health benefits of increased consumption of highly coloured fruit and vegetable and the range of products being offered by supermarkets he invented a novel potato variety that would appeal to modern consumers.
Watts said: ‘'In the early 2000s medical and nutritional research began to show there might be significant health benefits from eating fruit and vegetables with high levels of anthocyanins. And in 2003 we made a series of crosses with coloured ‘heritage varieties’ to try and boost the levels of these antioxidants in new, high yielding and disease resistant varieties.
“The crosses yielded a rainbow of colour in more than 2,000 seedlings produced by AFBI and they had better yields and disease resistance than the parents. A Canadian potato producer visited AFBI and this led to one of the seedlings being registered in Canada as Purple Magic. And, yes people are buying it and they want more of it. We are now registering the variety in Europe and plan to have it on the market by 2018.”
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