NEXT LITTLE THING--designer fruit

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NEXT LITTLE THING

 

Designer Fruit

 

No one has done more to change the produce aisle than Floyd Zaiger, but his

biggest creation might be yet to come.

 

By Carlye Adler

 

Sometime in 2005 you may walk into a farmers' market and find a fruit that you

have never seen before and may not be able to pronounce: the peacotum (it rhymes

with " sea bottom " ). With the yellow flesh of a peach, the texture and juiciness

of a plum, and the velvety overcoat of an apricot, the peacotum tastes more like

fruit punch than any of its parent breeds and is the first three-fruit hybrid

headed for the mass market.

Floyd Zaiger, a Modesto, Calif., inventor and the most prolific fruit breeder in

the world, created the peacotum. His family-owned company, Zaiger's Genetics,

has patented more than 200 new varieties of fruit, all through conventional

pollination. (Despite the company's name, Zaiger performs no genetic

modification; instead he accelerates the natural selection process through

hand-pollination.) Among his achievements, Zaiger, 78, has found a way to reduce

the acid level in peaches, give unripe apricots an appealing red blush, and make

white peaches-previously a mushy mess-firm enough to be shipped around the

world. (Not sold commercially until 15 years ago, white varieties now make up

22% of all peaches in the U.S.; Zaiger created most of those breeds.) Another of

Zaiger's successes is the pluot-a plum-apricot hybrid that is available in

purple, yellow, or green with red polka dots and now constitutes about

one-fourth of the plum market. (Never heard of a pluot? Ask your kids. Some are

sold under the name " dinosaur eggs. " )

 

For his accomplishments in creating new fruit, Zaiger has been recognized around

the world. The King of Morocco invited him to recommend selections for planting,

and the French government named him Officier in the Order du Merite Agricole

(one step up from knight). " He's the father of exotic fruit, " says Paul Buxman,

a farmer who grows many Zaiger varieties at Sweet Home Ranch, a 55-acre spread

in Dinuba, Calif. " He's a biological inventor who treads where most scientists

don't think about going. He'll be in the encyclopedia one day. "

 

Zaiger may seem to be following an odd pursuit, but there's big money in new

fruit varieties. " On the retail end, everyone is looking for something

different, " says Eric Christensen, a citrus grower and the owner of Rising C

Ranches in Reedley, Calif. While the traditional staples-bananas, apples,

grapes, and pears-are still the biggest sellers, fruits that were once

unheard-of in the U.S. now bring in $100 million each year, or more. According

to the Produce Marketing Association, based in Newark, Del., mangoes sell about

$280 million a year, and papayas have grown to a $96 million business. Although

too small to be tracked by the PMA, other specialized items have started

appearing on the shelves recently: the thin-skinned, high-juice Meyer lemon; the

easy-to-peel seedless Delite mandarin orange; and the 70% apricot, 30% plum

aprium (this one, a Zaiger creation, saw consumer demand jump after Martha

Stewart made aprium jam on her TV show).

 

The industry's most famous success story, though, is the kiwi. Formerly called a

chinese gooseberry, it was imported from New Zealand in the 1960s, and today

it's a standard produce item that last season rang in $91 million in

sales-double that of the apricot. Even more impressive is its far-reaching

acceptance. While many shoppers will often confuse the papaya with the mango, or

the mango with the guava, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who couldn't

identify a kiwi.

 

Yet of all Zaiger's creations-including two others entering commercial testing

in 2005: the nectaplum (peach and plum) and the white aprium-it's the

three-in-one peacotum that stands out as the biggest recent advance in fruit

technology. " The peacotum is most unique, " says Robert Woolley, owner of the

Dave Wilson Nursery, a company that grows and sells Zaiger's creations. " It can

go kiwi. "

 

The path to the peacotum began not with a " eureka! " moment but with a few

questions and a large dose of natural curiosity. Floyd Zaiger grew up picking

strawberries on a migrant labor crew before catching what he calls the " dreaded

disease of fruit breeding. " (He says his obsession earns him little money; his

wife, Betty, says it gave him ulcers.) In the 1950s, Zaiger apprenticed with

Fred Anderson, a fruit breeder, now deceased, who was known as the " father of

the peach. " After a few years with Anderson, Zaiger struck out on his own in

1959, first experimenting with ornamental plants and eventually graduating to

fruit hybrids-trying to create something bigger, firmer, prettier, or tastier by

mixing peaches with peaches, peaches with plums, plums with cherries, and so on.

Zaiger took many of his cues from nature-these crosses can happen in the wild,

courtesy of bees. In the 1970s he discovered a fuzzy plum in the middle of a

tree of smooth plums that he had crossed, and he became bent on replicating it.

That would ultimately lead to the peacotum, but the project would take him

almost 30 years.

 

The first step began with choosing the best parents from Zaiger's bank of 2,200

breeding-stock trees (in this case a peachcot and a plumcot-apricot-peach and

apricot-plum hybrids he had already successfully created). Regardless of which

parents he selects, Zaiger can never guarantee that the hoped-for

characteristics will appear. The permutations are endless; some versions of the

finished product could turn out fuzzy, round, and bitter, while others are

smooth, heart-shaped, and delicious. " It's like playing cards, " Zaiger says.

" The numbers are always there, but you're not sure when they'll come up. "

 

For all his experiments Zaiger uses hand-pollination, which requires removing

the stamen from one flower-preventing it from self-pollinating and contaminating

itself-and applying the pollen of another with an eye-shadow brush. (Zaiger

previously tried pencil erasers, but he found they wasted too much pollen;

mini-paintbrushes proved too expensive.) When he gets a fruit hybrid he likes,

Zaiger plants its seeds in his 40-acre seedling orchard, where the young trees

will remain for between one and three years. The plants with the most promise

are moved to a secondary orchard for further evaluation, and the rest-some

50,000 a year-are scrapped. " You have to be ruthless, " says Zaiger. He won't

know for another three to five years whether he has something with commercial

potential.

 

While the peacotum looked attractive from the beginning, the early versions

tasted so awful that Zaiger almost had to dare people to try them. " It was so

nasty it would lock your jaw, " recalls nursery owner Robert Woolley. " Astringent

and sour, with a smell that would hang with you like rotten salami. " Zaiger went

back into the lab to fix the flavor, but he had to try thousands of recrosses

before he got the result he wanted.

 

The process is labor-intensive, but Zaiger's company is a family business in

which everyone helps out. Betty Zaiger, 73, keeps the books; the Zaigers' two

sons oversee the farming, with Grant, 48, running the embryo lab and Gary, 53,

evaluating planted selections. (The latter task requires so much walking around

the 160-acre property that Gary says his flat-footedness has gotten worse.) The

Zaigers' 51-year-old daughter, Leith Gardner-yes, she sees the humor of her

married name-is general manager. All family members are responsible for coming

up with names. The peacotum was named so long ago that family members can't

recall who came up with it-most likely an uncle. The first choice was " pub

plum, " named for the fuzz on the fruit, scientifically known as pubescence.

 

Zaiger isn't above trying some outrageous tactics when he feels they might help.

He once zapped some of his plants with an X-ray machine to see if he could cause

their mutation. Another time he stormed into his greenhouse with a hammer and

pounded some of his buds-hoping to shock them into spontaneous change. (Neither

experiment worked.) Yet some of his ideas have become standard in the industry,

such as growing his breeding trees in movable containers, so they can be easily

moved out of greenhouses in good weather.

 

After the Zaigers invent a fruit, they have almost nothing to do with selling

it. The Dave Wilson Nursery, based in Hickman, Calif., a third-generation family

business, is the sole licensor and primary grower of Zaiger's varieties in the

U.S. It grows nearly a million at a time, which it sells to farmers for their

own orchards. The farmers eventually bring the fruit to market. They pay the

nursery about $5 for each tree, plus a royalty of $1 to $2.25, most of which

goes back to Zaiger. It's not unusual for him to wait more than 15 years to make

money from a new variety. After nearly three decades of working on the peacotum,

Zaiger hasn't seen any revenue from it. " It's not get-rich-quick, " he says.

 

Because of those economics, his company spent about 30 years in the red, though

it is now profitable. He declined to disclose financials, but a

back-of-the-envelope calculation would put his annual revenue somewhere between

$1 million and $2 million, nearly all from royalties. It costs about $1 million

a year to run the operation. He would probably do better if the fruit business

were not so prone to intellectual-property theft. The National Licensing

Association, based in Seattle, estimates that about one-third of patented fruit

trees in the U.S. are planted and grown without proper licensing or payment of

royalties. That doesn't count what happens overseas. Zaiger has found his plants

in Chile, China, Iran, and Russia. In some countries, Zaiger says, thieves are

sent into orchards to steal budwood (a branch from which more trees can be

grown). Once Zaiger caught a visiting grower taking a piece of his cherry

budwood; another time someone entered the property while the family was on

vacation and dug up two full-grown pluot trees.

 

While the peacotum, as far as the family is aware, has not yet been stolen, it

does provoke its own controversy. Craig Ledbetter, a research geneticist at the

USDA Agricultural Research Service in Parlier, Calif., calls the peacotum a

" fantasy, " saying it is extremely rare for a true hybrid of that nature to yield

fruit, especially fruit of any quality and quantity. That skepticism likely

stems from a dispute a few years back, when the industry's marketing

association, the California Tree Fruit Agreement, hired the University of

California to perform a DNA test on the pluot, which found that the so-called

hybrid didn't contain any apricot traits. Zaiger says the test was not conducted

properly. Tests in Spain have corroborated his claim, but the situation is

unresolved.

 

After 30 years of work and 20,000 crosses, there are six commercially viable

selections of peacotums. (One has a dark-maroon skin with a yellow flesh, and

another, shaped like an old-fashioned wooden top, has red and yellow skin.) A

few selections have been released to farmers for an experimental trial, and some

could be in supermarket produce sections in three to five years. " It has the

flavor to become a winner, " says David Karp, a writer specializing in fruit.

" The Zaigers have a track record. "

 

Right now the next generation of peacotums is lying nascent in the trees,

waiting until June to ripen. When that happens, farmers will come to squeeze and

taste the fruit and decide whether they want to buy trees. Some of the peacotums

will be trucked to local farmers' markets and sold to consumers. In the

meantime, the Zaigers are working on crossing their newest hybrid: a peacotum

and a cherry. Any guess as to what it will be called?

 

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