On marketing new fruits and vegetables

I was called up today by a writer of a feature article that will publish at some future date in the NYT Sunday magazine. The angle of the story, as far as I could tell, was a question: How would a marketer best purpose to introduce a new fruit - such as an unknown foreign heirloom variety or even a transgenic fruit or vegetable - into the U.S. market? He already had a list of the "usual suspects" of Frieda's, World Variety, PMA and others. I don't know if I was much help, but I did give him the name of Steve Lutz with The Perishables Group.

I think the assumption of the feature is that the marketing of transgenic fruits and vegetables will be much more common in the future. How, then, will the products be introduced and sold in the marketplace?

I told him that marketers who control their own retail operations - for example, some importers in Hong Kong also have their own retail shop - would obviously have more control over the decision on whether or not to sell transgenic produce to consumers.

As an aside, the author also mentioned the work of the Plant Transformation Research Center at the University of California Riverside It sounds if we may hear more about their work in future years. Here is what the center's Web site says about their work:

The goal of the Plant Transformation Research Center (PTRC) is research on efficient procedures for transforming plants of interest to researchers at UCR. This includes species of economic interest in California , and model systems used to investigate gene function. The PTRC facilitates the research of many UCR scientists who are investigating genes important in metabolic, physiological and developmental processes. The PTCR can provide cost-effective access to biochemical and molecular methods utilized in the analysis of genetically modified plants. The PTRC also serves as a resource in training students, post docs, and staff in technologies related to plant transformation.