Designer fruits. What's the deal?

Hybrid fruit...designer fruit? Like Jimmy Chu? No silly!  Nectaplums, pluots, kistraws...what? Come again... 


A peach is no longer just a peach. Much of the fruit today, like their strange names, (see pluot, by clicking here) is designed or outright invented. Hybrid fruit in the United States alone is a $100 million business.

These new fruits are genetic crosses of different fruits, and many of them are the invention of Zaiger's Genetics and the company's founder, Floyd Zaiger, in Modesto, Calif. They created the Nectaplum, nectarine and plum, and the Pluot, a blend of plum and apricot. Zaiger's has patented more than 200 new fruits (click here to see them). Floyd Zaiger is careful to point out that these new fruits are the product of cross-breeding, not genetic engineering.


They cross pollen of one fruit with the flower of another, grow fruit, collect seed, and grow a tree from the seed. Repeating the process, they can determine skin, color, texture and flavor. Some of these varieties take 10 or 20 years to develop into something that looks good, has the right consistency, ships to market without damage and meets the ever-changing public taste and farming conditions. The name and cross is dependent on the percentage and qualities the hybrid takes. For example, Black Velvet Plums are a different cross from pluots and apriums in that it has 50% plum and 50% apricot. This is supposed to "mellow" the skin of the plum, which is often quite tangy and even spicy, so that it is softer and more yielding like an apricot's.

Little did you know, you have been eating hybrids for years. You may not have realized it because the names are more conventional but, our friendly yellow breakfast banana, otherwise known as the “dessert banana,” is actually a hybrid. Tangelo ring a bell? Boysenberries are a hybrid between a blackberry and raspberry, Meyer lemons are a hybrid of a lemon and a Mandarin orange, kiwis are hybrids of the genus Actinidia, and grapefruits are an 18th-century hybrid originally bred in Jamaica. Apples—Braeburn, Macoun, Macintosh, Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious—are also familiar hybrids. 

The newer model hybrids (yes, we are still talking about fruit not cars) seem more distinctive because of their quirky names and more exotic flavors. Consider the endless possibilities: a nectacotum (hybrid of apricot, plum, and nectarine), the peacotum (hybrid of peach, apricot, and plum), the nectarcot (hybrid of nectarine and apricot) or the lemonquat (hybrid citrus of lemon and kumquat with an edible rind). The once-exotic tangelo, a cross between a tangerine and either a pomelo or a grapefruit, now seems ordinary in the face of next-generation fruit hybrids that tempt us with their good looks and striking tastes.

Read more on: Black Velvet Plums HERE, Ugli fruit HERE, others HERE.

*photos are not of actual hybrids but rather digital creations*


sources: abcnews, TheDailyBeast, photos from freakingnews.com.