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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pairwise

Pairwise Gets Greenlight from USDA for CRISPR-Engineered Mustard Greens

While health benefits of mustard greens have long been known, the strong bitter taste and pungent smell has kept this leafy green from going as mainstream as lettuce or kale.

But that could change soon. That’s because CRISPR-focused produce startup Pairwise got approval in mid-August from the USDA for their gene-edited version of Brassica juncea, more commonly known as mustard greens.

According to a release sent to The Spoon, the USDA sent confirmation to Pairwise in mid-August that the company was approved to move forward with their new take on a leafy green that has not been on many menu due to a pungent smell and bitter taste. With changes engineered by CRISPR technologies, Pairwise hopes to create a nutritious alternative to kale and Brussels sprouts that also tastes good.

Pairwise Greens in the field

According to Pairwise, their new mustard greens will feature a strong nutrition profile with supple leaves that hold up well to salad dressings and toppings and will have green and deep purple colors.

When I interviewed Pairwise CEO Tom Adams a month ago, he told me one of the reasons the company focused on mustard greens was the high yield of the crop.

Mustard greens “look just like lettuce, they they feel like lettuce, so if we could eliminate that flavor and make them taste like lettuce that they that they would be like lettuce,” said Adams. “It turns out they actually have another attribute, which is they yield on an acre basis. They yield about three times as much as kale.”

According to Pairwise, they currently have five varieties of the gene-edited produce in field trials. They have plans to expand the field trials in a few months to include the edited product and will provide sample products to partners this fall.

How CRISPR Could Create Produce That Lasts Longer, Tastes Better, and Won’t Make Pickers Bleed

Pairwise is one of the companies making a name for itself developing new types of products using CRISPR. The company is developing consumer-facing brands of produce that offer unique characteristics created through the use of CRISPR toolsets.

I caught up the CEO of Pairwise, Tom Adams, to discuss what the company is working on and to get his thoughts on how CRISPR will change the food system. Below are some excerpts from my interview. Spoon Plus subscribers can watch the interview and read the full, unedited transcript.

What are some examples of these types of CRISPR products with direct consumer benefits?

So a product that we’re interested in, sort of it’s a longer term product, is to create a cherry without a pit. You can imagine being able to just pop a cherry in your mouth and really enjoy that healthy, healthy fruit. Cherries are in season right now. They’re great, but I keep ending up with purple fingers from eating them all. I’d love to be able to just pop them over my mouth and eat them like grape. So that’s the kind of thing where we’re taking it down the barrier so that a consumer can really enjoy the cherry differently.

Now we’ll do other things that help with the overall production system. One of our ideas with cherries is to make it so you can produce cherries year round like we’ve done through 60 years of breeding with blueberries. We now have blueberries every day and I didn’t use to get blueberries every day but now I do.

How could CRISPR could accelerate the development of new forms of produce compared with traditional cross-breeding of crops?

There actually is a pitless plum that somebody isolated a few years ago. It’s not a good tasting plum, so it’s not a variety that sold. But you can cross plums and cherries, and you get chums or clerries or something. It’s not a cherry or a plum anymore. The Bing cherry was bred in 1880 and Bing cherry since then is a clone of that original tree. So if you cross them, that’s not a Bing cherry anymore.

You want to get back to the Bing cherry, you’d cross the chum back to the cherry probably 7 or 8 or 9 times until you get a little bit more cherry genome in it each time until you’re almost cherry again. That’s probably 150 years from now you’d have a pitless cherry. But with gene editing, I know what the mutation is that really resulted in the loss of the pits, so I can just go directly into the cherry and make that mutation. It’s the same endpoint that I would have gotten to through the breeding. It’s just 150 years faster.

One thing you’re working on is berries. Can you tell us more?

The blackberries I buy in the grocery store, I could take or leave. And that’s because they’re the variety that had some mutations in it that allow it to be more productive through the season. This mutation just happens to be in a variety that just doesn’t taste good. It’s very high acid. It’s not a really great berry. So we’re taking berries that taste like the ones in the Northwest and we’re putting in the same mutations that you’d see on the bad tasting ones that allow for higher productivity, and adding those to the really good tasting one. And then, just for good measure, we’re also going to get rid of the seeds. It turns out that 85% of people don’t really like the seeds in blackberries from our research. And it’s a fairly straightforward path to do that and then remove the thorns as well, so pickers aren’t bleeding.

What impact could CRISPR have on food in a decade?

10 years from now, what I’d like to picture is a lot of produce that not just that has gene editing in it, but is actually more approachable for people. We all grow up being told and taught that we should eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but only 9% of people in the United States eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. And given 5% are vegetarians, that doesn’t speak real well for the rest of us. So I want to see a variety of things that are more approachable for people.

You mentioned food waste. I think there’s an opportunity to make a substantial difference in shelf life. So when I go into a convenience store, it’s not a choice between a hot dog and a rotten banana. I can get a bowl of berries or something healthy like that as a snack and or pitless cherries. So that’s really our vision is to create a whole different marketplace of foods that fit people’s lifestyles. We eat a lot more food through snacking today than we did 50 years ago and we need to match our food up with that.

To watch the full interview of our interview with Tom Adams or to read the full transcript, just subscribe to Spoon Plus.