Improving Fruit and Vegetable Flavors with ‘Consumer Assisted Selection’

Matching fruit and vegetable sensory attributes to human sensory desires is a difficult task.  Plant product quality is shaped by interactions between genetics, environment and management.  Human preferences are formed from interaction between sensory receptors, personal experiences, and marketing-based perceptions.  The overlap between these two areas defines the window of consumer liking for plant products.  Traditional plant genetic improvement has sought to increase production qualities such as disease resistance, yield, shipping quality and shelf life.  The remarkable success as breeding for these production traits, while de-prioritizing sensory quality, has led to a produce market offering room for flavor and aroma improvement.  To meet this challenge the Plant Innovation Center at the University of Florida brought together non-traditional collaborators.  Research groups from human sensory analysis, statistical scaling, genomics, biochemistry, marketing, postharvest physiology, plant breeding and other disciplines coalesced around the question of defining consumer preferences, and then using technology to breed new plant varieties to meet those objectives.  The results are new cultivars specifically designed to the demands of the consumer, which satisfy production requirements.  This ‘consumer-assisted selection’ approach requires integrated expertise working in a coordinated network, as the nexus of plant and human complexities cannot be addressed one dimensionally.