Over twelve years, a hundred thousand plants were created and grown in test tubes before developing the Cotton Candy variety of grape. Pollen from male grape flowers was extracted and brushed onto the female clusters of the target plant. He hand pollinated to cross pollinate millions of grapes to combine the sweet Concord grapes with common grapes in order to make them firmer.
He licensed that grape and began working to improve the size and texture by crossbreeding the grapes with sturdier California grapes. One was a purple Concord grape that tasted sweet like cotton candy, but was fragile with tiny seeds. A few months after forming the company, he attended a trade show where researchers from the University of Arkansas were showing grapes. "We want to change that.David Cain was a fruit geneticist and former USDA researcher who co-founded IFG in Bakersfield in 2001. "A lot of fruit becomes tasteless by the time somebody buys it," Cain says. "The whole process takes at least six years and sometimes up to 15 years," Cain says. After fertilizing the plant, Cain and his team have to take out the baby embryos from the plant, then grow them in individual test tubes in the lab before they ever make it to the field.Ĭain painstakingly created around 100,000 of these test tube plants before he stumbled upon the cotton-candy flavored grapes. (He couldn't say exactly which Concord-like grape he used because it's a trade secret).īreeding seedless grapes isn't easy, because they can't reproduce on their own. So Cain decided to put all the flavors of a Concord-like grape into the firm, crisp and seedless Vitis vineferia by crossing the two species.
The dark-purple berry is packed with exotic flavors and aromas, including one known as " foxy." But the Concord grape has seeds and its skin tends to fall off - not great qualities for a table grape. It's used to make Welch's juices, jams and jellies. It's used to make all of our wines.īut the world has dozens of grape species, and restricting the fruit in grocery stores to just one species also limits their flavors, Cain says. To get that vanilla flavor into the table grapes naturally, Cain and his team had to widen the plants' gene pool, mixing in genes from less common grape species.Īlmost all of the table grapes in America belong to the species Vitis vinifera. There are also hints off vanilla, Spencer says - and vanilla, it seems, is a key flavor in the archetypal "pink" cotton candy that makes your dentist cringe. In fact, sales have been so good that the fruit's distributor, The Grapery, bumped up its production from just two acres to 100 acres this year, with 200 acres planted for 2014. The Cotton Candy grape has already cleared those hurdles - it has been commercially available in limited quantities since 2011. "We're still testing those out to see if they're commercial viable." "We already have other varieties that taste like strawberry, pineapple or mango," he says. So the designer fruit is actually a hybrid - like pluots, peacharines and cherums. Just good old-fashioned plant breeding.Ĭain and his team at International Fruit Genetics in Bakersfield, Calif., made the Cotton Candy grape by hybridizing two different grape species. "We want to give consumers the same array of flavors for grapes."Īnd he's doing it without genetic engineering or artificial flavors.
"When you go to the supermarket, there's like 15 kinds of apples - Fuji, Pink Lady, Gala, Braeburn.