Tomato Fruit Flavour

With rising standards of living consumers are becoming more aware of the food they eat and often criticise certain aspects of quality, such as flavour. This trend will continue and producers, wholesalers and retailers will have to become more flavour conscious in relation to the food they are selling. The complaint is often heard that today commercially produced tomatoes are not as good as the ones from the back garden. There may be some truth in this since tomatoes produced in the back garden usually receive individual attention from the home gardener. In commercial production it is not possible to give this individual attention and yields are much higher. However, if growing conditions and nutrition are good, high quality well flavoured fruit can be produced. Research is in progress at Kinsealy on factors influencing fruit flavour and at least one supermarket chain considers good flavour as one of the most important attributes of the tomatoes they sell. These examples show that flavour is not the neglected child that many people point the finger at and every effort is being made to include good flavour as an essential quality factor in addition to other attributes.