GMO purple tomato available for purchase, $20 for 10 seed

I’m neither advocating for nor against GMO foods. Snapdragon genes are the key behind purple flesh color of these tomatoes. Read the terms and conditions carefully!

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I couldn’t find anything about its growing ability in the home garden. Is it going to crack open after a rain?

Only if it’s your favorite tomato when that doesn’t happen. :smile:

Too bad they didn’t throw in the gene for bioluminescent like in the “Firefly” petunia. Would make a great Halloween plant.

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I’m going to buy some seeds. I better grow more tentacles since it’s GMO.

Hopefully it’s super productive and disease resistant and tastes good. I’ve never seen them at the store. Anyone know what they taste like? I’m guessing yellow/orange cherry tomato taste. Not sure if the purple will taste like anything, it doesn’t seem to in potatoes to me.

According to info in their Investor Presentation, stacked disease resistance will be developed in 2025 with introduction in 2028. In the meantime they will be developing a processing tomato as this one is their fresh market tomato.

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I got some too, but mainly for the novelty of it, and to throw my $20 vote behind doing more of this kind of crop engineering. Anthocyanins don’t really have any flavor, but maybe if you close your eyes and concentrate really hard you can convince yourself it tastes purple. GMO corn that produces yet another 1% higher yield is well and good, but these kind of direct to consumer marketed improved fruit GMOs are a lot more fun. There hasn’t been much effort in engineering crops for better flavor or nutritional profiles (golden rice is one of the few that comes to mind). I bet there are a lot of low hanging fruit in this area.

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I bought Professor Torbert’s Orange Corn Grits when it came out with high carotenoids through traditional breeding. It tasted good but I didn’t buy any more as I quit eating grits regularly as I had little time in the mornings to cook them.

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I’ve been in off and on contact with his son Evan for about 6 years. If you want to spend an interesting few hours, look up Nalo Orange corn and read some of the details involved in breeding it.

Why the interest? I’m an amateur corn breeder developing a line of higher protein corn which is an excellent chicken feed. What if orange color could be incorporated along with higher protein and a few other useful traits? Yes! It is in progress.

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I bought some. I’m not going to do a lot of tomatoes this year so it’ll be fun to see something new.

Caution that my experience with high anthocyanin tomatoes is that they have poor flavor. I’m not saying this one does, but advise being circumspect.

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Received my Frankenseeds yesterday :grin:.


I thought the packaging would be fancier for $20.:grin:

I have grown midnight roma developed by Oregon state, is color purple is what novel in the norfolk tomato?

Indigo Rose is far from the first high anthocyanin tomato. Myers developed P20 blue about 2005.

I believe what’s “novel” is that they claim it tastes like a normal, good tomato, unlike most purple tomatoes. At least, the only purple tomato I’ve tasted was not very good, maybe that’s not true for all of them. I am guessing that by using genetic engineering they’ve added the purple color without some of the other flavor-influencing genes that are linked to that color in traditionally bred tomatoes.

midnight Roma has decent flavor and productive.

The outer package is fine for my taste, but the plastic bag with the seeds inside is too small for safe handling. It’s hard to get the seeds out. I lost a couple when pulling the seeds out. They sent some extra seeds too. Anyways, I planted the first 5 seeds


along with all other tomatoes I just started.

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Norfolk tomato’s novelty is from purple completely through the fruit where other high anthocyanin tomatoes have it only in the skin and a bit in the flesh beneath the skin.

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