Our mission
We have a simple mission: to enable the world to enjoy delicious, nutritious, beautiful tomatoes. The challenge is spoilage – many traditional heirloom varieties offer great flavor and appearance, but they spoil if not eaten within days of harvest.
Giant seed companies responded by developing ripening resistant varieties that are artificially gas ripened. This has enabled vast quantities of fruit to be sold around the globe, all year round. But the trade-off has been flavor; today’s typical supermarket-bought tomato is mealy and flavorless.
Over the last two decades, our small team of artisan breeders has solved this problem by traditional hand-crossing and selection approaches. The result is a portfolio of truly delicious varieties with exceptional appearance and natural resistance to spoilage.
Our ultimate driver is to ensure a reliable supply of quality seed for farmers and home-growers, with the aims of preserving crop diversity, ensuring that all communities have access to high quality vegetables, and reducing food waste.
How we breed exceptional tomatoes
Breeding great tomatoes is both an art and a science. The creative eye of an artist is needed to choose the best varieties for breeding and to select the best individual plants from large populations, while the rigor and knowledge of a scientist is needed to characterize and catalogue the breeding pool and to understand the inherent statistics and probabilities of obtaining individuals with desired features.
To create a new variety, the breeder first picks two existing varieties that carry desirable features that they would like to bring together in a new variety. A cross is then made, which requires quite a lot of dexterity; the anthers (pollen bearing male parts) of the plant chosen to be the female are carefully removed with tweezers before they mature, and the female parts, the stigma and style, are left intact. A mature flower that is shedding pollen is then taken from a plant of the second vareity, chosen to be the male parent in the cross, and pollen is dusted onto the stigma of the dissected flower on the female plant. The plants have now been mated and a tomato is left to mature from the flower to which the donor pollen was transferred. After several weeks, the ripened tomato from the cross is harvested and its seeds are collected and cleaned. These seeds from the cross are known as the "F1" or "first filial" generation.
The F1 seeds are then planted out; if the parents used for the cross were already stable open pollinated (OP) varieties, all of the F1 plants that grow from the collected seeds will be identical. The F1 plants are allowed to self fertilize and the seeds are then collected from fruits of the F1 plants (these are the F2 generation).
The F2 seeds are then planted out. Now something exciting happens; the different variants (known of alleles) of the genes that are present in the parents randomly assort amongst the F2 plants, such that each plant inherits different combinations of gene variants. As a result, there will usually be many differently looking plants in an F2 population and as a whole, the population will show a veritable smorgasbord of features. The breeder typically plants out a large number of F2 plants - this is where the artists eye comes in; the breeder selects individual plants from the F2 which carry the features which he or she is looking for and which the breeder believes will be valuable to grower. Such features (or "phenotypes" to use genetics lingo) could be vigorous growth, fruit size or shape or color, leaf shape and so on. Each F2 selected plant is allowed to self and its seed are collected - these are the F3.
The F3 plants are now planted; these will be less variable that the plants of the F2, with many individual plants looking like their parent, but others still appearing very different. F3 plants with the desired features seen in their parent are then allowed to self pollinate and their seed is collected - these are the F4. Most of the F4 now look like the original F2 grand parent but there are still a number which appear different. An F4 plant is selected with the desired features is now selected and allowed to self pollinate and seeds are collected - these are the F5. The F5 is then planted out and a desired plant is selfed and so on and so forth, until after 8-10 cycles of such "selfing" all the plants in the population are identical and carry the desired features, which will be a combination of the parents of the original cross.
The breeder can now congratulate themselves on having created a new "true breeding" variety, which is also known as an "open-pollinated variety" or "OP variety". The variety is said to be "true breeding" because if growers allow the plants to self and collect seed, the subsequent generation will all look the same and the variety is said to be stable. Seed can then be collected and handed down from generation to generation indefinitely. Many of the old popular heirloom varieties like Cherokee Purple have been maintained in this manner.
Now, although true breeding varieties are great for amateur gardens, they are not desirable for farming at scale. The reason is that OPs are inherently inbred and lack genetic diversity. Thus if large populations of the OP variety plants are grown, they often become susceptible to disease and are often less vigorous than a farmer desires. Farmers, by the way, are always looking for a bumper crop!
This is reason why we then combine our OP varieties to create elite F1 hybrids. This process makes use of a phenomenon often observed by geneticists, termed "hybrid vigor". Hybrid vigor is thought to arise when an individual contains extreme diversity in its gene complement, from two very different parents that mated together, and which thereby gives it the best chance of surviving and thriving no matter how challenging the environmental conditions are. The most extreme examples of hybrid vigor are often seen when different species are crossed together; a horse and a donkey for example, when crossed together produce offspring that are mules, and which are extremely hardy. However, mules are no good for breeding. The same is true for tomato breeding, if two stable OP varieties are crossed, the resulting seed are known as "F1 hybrids" and these usually perform better than their parents, exhibiting higher yield and disease resistance. But beware, if seed is collected from an F1 hybrid, the F2 generation will show extreme variation and the plants will exhibit a whole spectrum of sizes and fruit types not seen in the F1. So as a rule of thumb, OP variety seed will breed true, but F1 hybrid seed will not.
You may also note that F1 seed is always more expensive than OP seed - the reason for this is it is result of both a hand crossing process, and the need to grow many generations of plants before ideal parents can be selected, which are time consuming and labor intensive, whereas OP seed simply require allowing the parent plants to self pollinate.
Read more at the excellent publication Edible East Bay, which featured what have become Bene Seeds varieties back in 2016:
