Last year, startup Pairwise began selling the first Crispr-made food in the U.S.: a modern type of mustard with a customized flavor. However, chances are that most consumers have never had the opportunity to try them. The company introduced vegetables to the catering industry – selected restaurants, cafes, hotels, retirement centers and catering companies – in just a few cities. One grocery store in Up-to-date York also stocked them.
Now the biotechnology giant Bayer obtained a vegetable license from Pairwise and plans to distribute them to grocery stores throughout the country. “We hope to have the product on kitchen and dining tables this fall,” says Anne Williams, protected crops manager at Bayer’s vegetable seed division. He says Bayer is currently in talks with farms and salad makers about the best methods for growing and packaging vegetables.
Pairwise wanted to make salads more appetizing and nutritious, so the company chose mustard because of its high nutritional value, similar to kale. But their peppery, bitter taste means they are rarely eaten raw. Instead, they are usually cooked to make them tastier. The goal of the pair was to mellow the flavor while retaining the fiber, antioxidants and other nutrients that mustard offers. The company used Crispr to remove several copies of the gene responsible for their pungency. “We think people will really like the flavor,” Williams says.
Previously, Pairwise took vegetables to markets to conduct taste tests and explained to buyers that they were created through gene editing. According to Pairwise CEO Tom Adams, tasters generally gave positive reviews to the vegetables. Currently, the company focuses on the production of seedless cherries and blackberries. “We see our role in the food chain as inventing new products,” he says.
The first consumer-available Crispr-edited food debuted in Japan in 2021, when Tokyo-based startup Sanatech Seed started selling tomatoes with high levels of γ-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a chemical produced in the brain that also occurs naturally in some foods. The company claims that GABA can facilitate lower blood pressure and promote relaxation.
At Event on May 28 in the NetherlandsSanatech president Shimpei Takeshita said the company has expanded distribution in Japan and completed all formalities required to introduce tomatoes to the Philippines. He also wants to bring edited tomatoes to the United States.
High-GABA mustard and tomatoes are not genetically modified organisms, or GMOs – at least not in the established sense. Typically, GMOs are crops that contain the addition of genetic material from a completely different species. Gene editing, on the other hand, involves modifying the body’s own DNA.
Williams describes Crispr as a tool to speed up the breeding of modern plants, allowing scientists to make changes that could occur in nature, simply much faster. In the US, the Department of Agriculture has decided that crops obtained using gene editing do not have to undergo a lengthy regulatory review on the grounds that they do not contain foreign DNA and could otherwise be developed through conventional breeding, that is, selecting parent plants with specific traits to produce offspring with these characteristics.