Many people have heard that blueberries are a so-called “superfood,” without perhaps understanding why. The blue in the berry is the important factor; fruits and vegetables with deep coloring are highly beneficial to our health, a fact that became apparent to food scientists in the mid-1990s.
“The blue in the berry comes from a chemical compound called anthocyanin, which is full of antioxidants,” says Paul Watts, a scientist from Northern Ireland’s Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI). Once the health-boosting compound was identified, Watts embarked on a process of adding this chemical to root vegetables that grow abundantly in the Irish climate. Enter the purple potato.
“We developed Purple Magic after years of screening through large numbers of seedlings and picking the best,” says Watts. “The plant needed to be high-yielding with disease-resistance qualities, so we crossed some flavorful heritage varieties with some of the hardy varieties you’d see in the supermarket. The idea was to boost the overall levels of anthocyanins by having them in the flesh as well as the skin.”
This has been a long process, as Watts indicates is common in generating new crop varieties. “We made the first cross for Purple Magic back in 2003—that’s 13 years of research that has gone into this product,” he says.
The purple potato has a high dry matter content, which means it has strong flavor while remaining friable into crisps and chips. This is critical because Watts feels Purple Magic will enter the mass market initially as a processed product, with sales of the fresh potato in supermarkets only coming later with further development. The potato is a niche variety that will initially be more suitable for markets, restaurants and specialty shops. On the crisp side, Purple Magic is already being marketed in the U.S. and Canada under a sub-license with Solanum International. American chip company Terra Chips has used Purple Magic to make blue potato chips with a distinctive white ring around the edge.
The AFBI will continue to hold the licensing rights for the potato, with full IP protection being put into place now, while distribution is handled by experts like Solanum.
Source: TechWatch