"Most shoppers buy regular berries. Others splurge on organic berries. But more are now filling their carts with these luxury berries.
If you spot a clamshell with a Driscoll’s Sweetest Batch sticker, you’re staring at the premium brand, the finest berries of a company that trademarked the phrase “only the finest berries.”
You can also tell they’re Sweetest Batch berries simply by looking at the price tag. A dozen strawberries might set you back $6.99. I’ve seen 11-ounce containers of blueberries for $10.99 and $12.99 in stores that are right next door to each other. The organic raspberries cost roughly 30% more than a box of conventional raspberries, and a carton of Sweetest Batch raspberries cost another 30% more per pound.
Sweetest Batch is a tiny part of Driscoll’s overall revenue—for now. Like the berries themselves, the business needs time to grow. It takes between five and seven years to breed a new variety, and the first Sweetest Batch products hit the market five years ago, starting with strawberries and raspberries. They account for about 20% of the privately owned company’s blueberry sales, which executives say is a reasonable goal for the entire premium line.
The other goal of the Sweetest Batch program is to boost the quality of all Driscoll’s strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. By selecting the berries with the traits they want, they are keeping those genes around for longer, which means every batch will get sweeter.
It might sound obvious that a company in the business of making strawberries decided to make one that tasted better.
Every berry is a genetic compromise because selecting for one trait means sacrificing another. In theory, Driscoll’s breeders could optimize for a berry that’s sweeter than the ones that currently exist. In reality, that berry would probably be so fragile that it would barely get across the street, much less across the country. Even the really, really tasty Sweetest Batch varieties must satisfy Driscoll’s criteria for productivity, efficiency and market condition.
That quest for flavor involves Driscoll’s sensory analysts, plant pathologists and molecular geneticists. Even top executives have cups of berries waiting at their desk every day for the consumer lab to collect data. And the company gets input from people who have been recruited for their sophisticated palettes: supertasters.
Taste is subjective, but Driscoll’s wanted to make it more objective. The company developed a sensory wheel that includes more than 100 different words to describe taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), texture (crunchy, melty, firm, mushy), mouthfeel (juicy, chalky, refreshing, puckering, astringent, effervescent) and flavor and aroma (fruity, candied, floral, herbal).
Every year, Rak gets a massive data file predicting the outcomes of more than 250,000 possible genetic crosses. He quickly weeds out the ones that won’t hit the minimum thresholds for yield, flavor and shelf life, plus the ones that don’t have specific markers for disease resistance and sugar production. That whittles the list down to something like 10,000 potential varieties, and Driscoll’s can only plant roughly 200 in the test plot. After they’re seedlings, they survive five stages and a two-year farm trial before they’re ready for commercial sales, and fewer than 10 varieties have been released since 2017. “The breeding program is all about finding outliers,” he said."
