Recent On a visit to my local Pittsburgh grocery store, Giant Eagle, I noticed something new in the fruit section: a single pineapple in a pink and forest green box. A photo on the front of the box showed the pineapple cut into pieces, revealing its rosy flesh. Billed as the “jewel of the jungle,” this fruit was PinkGlow pineapple, developed by American food giant Fresh Del Monte. It cost $9.99, a little over twice the price of a regular yellow pineapple.
I put a box in my cart, took a photo with my phone, and shared my discovery with foodie friends. I told them the color was the result of genetic modification (the box was labeled “Bioengineered”), but no one seemed fazed. I brought Pink Glow to a Super Bowl party, where people wowed at the color and gobbled them down. They were juicier and less sour than regular pineapples, and they had another difference: their distinctive heads had been chopped off. Soon, friends were buying Pink Glows, too. One friend even used Pink Glow to brew homemade tepache, a fermented drink made from pineapple rinds that was invented in pre-Columbian Mexico.
With orange cauliflower and white strawberries now common in American grocery stores, a non-yellow pineapple doesn’t seem all that out of place. Still, I wondered: Why does it look flashy now? Why is it pink? And why did my friends and I buy it so quickly?
When I brought When I posed my question to Hans Sauter, Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Vice President of Research, Development and Agricultural Services at Fresh Del Monte, he started by giving me a brief history of the fruit. Like me, you may think of pineapples as always sweet and brightly colored, but that wasn’t the case before the 1990s. Store-bought pineapples of the old days had green shells and pale yellow flesh, and were often more sour than sweet. Buying fresh was a bit of a gamble. “No one really knew if the fruit was ripe, and pineapple consumption was primarily canned, where you could trust what you were eating,” Sauter says. Some canned pineapples had added sugar, making them a sweeter, more consistent product.
In 1996, the company introduced Del Monte Gold Extra Sweet, which was yellower and less sour than any pineapple on the market at the time. Pineapple sales soared and consumer expectations of pineapples were transformed. Gold’s popularity sparked an international pineapple war when the fruit’s rival, Dole, introduced its own variety. Del Monte sued, alleging that Dole had essentially stolen Gold’s formula. The two companies eventually settled out of court.
Following the success of the Gold pineapple, Del Monte was looking for new traits that would make pineapples even more appealing to consumers, Sauter says. But breeding pineapples is a time-consuming process; it can take more than two years for a single plant to produce mature fruit. Del Monte spent 30 years breeding pineapples with specific desirable traits before it was ready to release Gold. Waiting another 30 years for a new variety was “not an option,” Sauter says. So in 2005, the company turned to genetic engineering.
Del Monte wasn’t trying to create a pink pineapple, but Sauter says that at the time, consumers were interested in antioxidant-rich fruits. (Açai bowls and pomegranate juice anyone?) Pineapples naturally convert a reddish-pink pigment called lycopene, which is high in antioxidants, into yellow beta-carotene. (Lycopene gives tomatoes and watermelon their color.) Blocking this process could produce pineapples with pink flesh and high antioxidants. The company tasked a team of dedicated pineapple researchers with figuring out how to do it.
The team decided to make three changes to the pineapple’s genome: They inserted mandarin DNA to boost lycopene expression, and they added a “silencing” RNA molecule that suppresses the pineapple’s own lycopene-converting enzyme, thereby reducing its sour taste. (RNA silencing is the same technique used to create GMO Arctic apples that don’t brown.) Finally, Del Monte added a tobacco gene that confers resistance to certain herbicides, but company representatives say this was just so scientists could verify that the other genetic changes worked, not because Del Monte plans to use those herbicides in production.
