Brad Rickard has an inquisitive mind and a generous heart. He has presented with us in numerous venues and always left the audience thinking: Cornell Professor Brad RickardReturns To London To Unveil New Study: QUANTITY, VALUE AND DIVERSITY —The 10-Year Evolution Of Consumer Purchase Preferences For Packaged Produce Can Labeling Impact Food Waste?Is Zero Waste The Optimal Standard?Cornell’s Brad Rickard To Present New Research At The London Produce Show And Conference What’s in A Word? Sell By, Use By, Best By And Fresh By.. Can A Word Alter Food Waste Significantly? Cornell’s Brad Rickard Speaks Out Cornell’s Brad Rickard Returns To The New York Produce Show And Conference: Will ‘GMO Free’ Be The New Organic? What’s In A Name? Professor Brad Rickard Of Cornell Produces New Research That Indicates Shakespeare May Have Been In Error… On Apples At Least Cornell’s Brad Rickard To Unveil Generic Produce Promotion Research Done By Cornell And Arizona State University At New York Produce Show And Conference Now, at the most recent New York Produce Show and Conference, Professor Rickard presented some new research built around grapes, focusing on consumer attitudes and industry dynamics related to gene editing. We asked Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor, Mira Slott, to detail: Brad RickardAssociate Professor of Food and Agricultural EconomicsFaculty Fellow, Cornell Atkinson Center for SustainabilityCharles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and ManagementCornell SC Johnson College of BusinessCollege of Agriculture and Life Sciences Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Q: Hi Brad, first, thanks for being part of the Foundational Excellence Program. Miguel Gómez provided a nice overview, including your quick-fire multi-faceted talk, summarizing several research projects for that Program. I also want to thank you for your more in-depth educational micro session that ran concurrently during the Main Trade Show at the Javits Center. Thanks for sending me your related research to review in advance of your session. As expected, the topic is thought-provoking and newsworthy. Your dynamic talks are always a major draw. A: Mira, it’s good to reconnect with you, and it was nice to catch up with you again at the Show. This year’s educational session was based on work studying consumers’ willingness to accept gene edited fruit, and a paper focused on the application to quality traits for fresh table grapes. Q: What was the impetus for the study? Is it a continuation or complementary to research you’ve done? Why are you focusing on fresh table grapes? I know it’s a highly competitive category with thousands of varieties, so I think it might be interesting to just have context on that front as well… A: Okay. Yes, this one I would say is mostly motivated because I’m involved in a big USDA project built around breeding grapes. It’s a project that’s a little bit backward looking but mostly forward looking about what sort of things grape breeders should be taking into consideration. So, it’s things like climate change, soil use, water use, these types of sustainability attributes on the production of grapes. Yield is always a big deal when you’re thinking about new breeds of any type of fruits. But I think it’s especially true of table grapes with pest resistance. USDA included us in this big project because they also wanted people to think about the consumer element and what’s interesting or important to consumers of grapes, table grapes, raisin grapes, wine grapes. But what I talked about at the Show is just a piece specific to table grapes. Q: Yes, that was of specific interest to our audience. A: So, this is part of a much larger project, a five-year USDA project, called Vitis Gen. Vitis is the Latin word for grapes, and Gen represents the next generation in breeding. Q: Could you provide context on why you’re concentrating consumer research on gene editing on the grape category? A: Yes. So, consumers will just have to think about green grapes and red grapes or black grapes. But then, unlike apples, they don’t really carry varietal names, or as consumers, we don’t think about the varietal names. But you’re right, there are heaps and heaps of varieties in the background that sort of feed the red grapes category throughout different parts of the world and the same with green… There are some flagship table grapes varieties… I put together a couple of nice slides that show the market share of the main ones for red, green, and black, and the evolution of these varieties… when they were introduced, what market share they got to, what was their maximum market share. For instance, in the green table grape varieties between 1971 and 2020, the total acres have been about the same. In fact, there’s maybe a few less acres in green table grape production now than there was back in 1970 in the United States. But there was sort of seven main categories back in 1970 and then today we see that there are 20 main varieties…Thompson’s Seedless used to be probably 70 percent of the acreage back in 1970, and it’s still a big share but it’s probably closer to 25 percent now. Q: Okay. A: All these other varieties have come on board and some of them have come out of public breeding programs. Some have come out of private breeding programs. Some are licensed and patented. Some of them are still sort of coming out of USDA. But I think the punchline is that there’s many more varieties available to growers. The same could be said about red table grape varieties. I think we’ve gone from about six main varieties back in 1970 to closer to 25 varieties nowadays. Q: Has the motivation in these breeding programs concentrated on industry production issues, shelf-life advantages, etc. Are the flavor profiles, taste, crispness, and all these consumer facing characteristics dramatically different between all these varieties… A: They can be. These different attributes that we look at in the study can vary between varieties. They changed over time. There’s been improvements in most of those attributes, in addition to other attributes with yield and production, etc. as well. Q: Are consumers tuned in to the nuances of all these different varieties… A: Consumers maybe aren’t aware…if you’re not in the table grape business, you might be surprised how many varieties there are being grown in the United States today relative to 50 years ago. I guess it just helps to motivate this whole USDA project about breeding because there’s quite a bit of breeding activity in the grape industry. There’s a lot of new varieties that exist today that didn’t exist in the past. There’s a lot of other new varieties that are on the horizon and just the whole business of breeding table grapes has become more interesting. It’s a good time to think about all these different attributes that you could breed for. You could breed for yield. You could breed for sweetness and crispness and those things that we include in our study. You could breed for the environmental attributes as well. I guess I’m just giving some iteration that this breeding business is kind of dynamic for various reasons. Q: With that context, let’s get into this study, where you’re trying to analyze consumer willingness to pay for gene-edited grapes versus conventional. The first question is defining gene editing and how it compares or contrasts to genetic engineering, or GMO’s. GMO’s have generated major controversy in the U.S. and globally. Are there many different types of gene edits that can be done, what’s the science involved? And do consumers even understand the difference? A: Yes and no. These are good questions. I have some answers here. Why don’t I just start with the background of genetic engineering. That’s a good place to start. So, we’re not scientists here but gene editing has sort of become an alternative to GMO’s…and the motivation here, I think, is that in previous fruits and vegetables and other agricultural crops, there has been a lot of breeding programs that became interested in genetically modified or genetically engineered varieties. And that’s faced a lot of pushback from consumers. So now as we move forward in plant breeding techniques, gene editing is different from genetic engineering or different from genetically modified organisms. We can talk a little bit about the technology, but it’s different. It’s sort of new…it’s the next step in plant breeding technologies. And some people fear that it may face this similar sort of pushback from consumers because it’s a new breeding technology. Gene editing kind of sounds a bit like genetic engineering. But it is different. The way I describe it, it lets scientists manipulate the DNA. They’re able to remove, insert, replace portions of DNA in plants. It also has applications elsewhere, to bacteria, plants, and animals, but the focus here is on plants, on table grapes. And then the other thing about this, we’ve come across four different systems of gene editing. The one that seems to be the most talked about, that scientists are most excited about is this CRISPR, an acronym, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat. CRISPR is one type of gene editing that scientists think has potential for plant breeding. They typically would describe it as being simpler, faster, cheaper, and more accurate than these other gene editings. Perhaps it’s the gene editing technology that has the most future now. Q: Okay. Is it being used now in any produce items? A: There’s a lot of science underway that’s investigating the application of CRISPR to casaba and grapefruit and maize and mushrooms and some other fruits and vegetables. Q: In some of the research, there was information about experimental gene editing by plant breeding programs that included tomatoes and potatoes and citrus. A: I know there are a lot of studies going on that are using CRISPR gene editing technologies applied to a wide range of crops. In the case of oranges, there are efforts trying to deal with that citrus greening problem that’s a big issue in Florida. I think except for Canola, gene editing is not being used commercially in the United States. This is a bigger project on plant breeding we’re doing together as a team with researchers from Washington State University and UC Davis. Q: What caught my eye was the reference to market-oriented traits… A: Yes, that would be the more consumer-oriented projects. Some of them are done for things like the food quality. Sometimes it’s shelf life. Sometimes it’s things like size. In our study, what we’re doing is thinking about the fruit taste, texture, external appearance, and chemical applications. We want to know how important those things are to consumers and then in addition, how important are those things with or without different breeding techniques, specifically through conventional breeding or gene editing, and what’s the tradeoff, because most consumers like tastier fruit, but some consumers are a little hesitant to get that through some sort of perhaps controversial breeding technology. We want to try to understand that tradeoff or that tension for consumers on average. There is so much someone will pay for better tasting fruit but then they may also have a discount if they hear that it was produced through gene editing. We’re able to compare premiums of better tasting fruit versus the discount. Do they wash out or is one of those effects more important? Does that make sense? Q: Yes. That would require establishing what attributes are important to consumers and then their willingness to pay for them with or without gene editing? A: That’s right. We’re trying to say what attributes are important to U.S. consumers and then layered on top of that, how do you feel about this new breeding technology? It’s not genetic engineering, it’s gene editing, and we give them information to describe what is gene editing. Some consumers know about gene editing, while others don’t. And so they rely on the information we give them to think about this technology. Q: Could you give us some isight into how the research was conducted, the methodology…how the information was communicated to participants, etc. A: We could talk a little about the survey we did, about the scenarios we gave, and then about the results. Q: I know we can’t cover everything here, but it will be great to get some of the highlights. Another point I’m hoping you can discuss is related to regulation of these new technologies and impacts of consumer product labeling. Is it correct that the USDA is not going to be regulating gene editing in the same way they are doing with genetic engineering? If so, could that make a difference in the big picture? I remember studies you’ve done on these effects, exploring whether labeling a product as GMO, could create, fairly or not, a skull-and-crossbones alarm for consumers, and alternatively, companies marketing product as non-GMO could be used as a selling point… And how different products elicited different consumer responses… Without a gene-edited label, for instance, will the consumer even know one way or the other? A: I think this is part of the story. It depends how deep the consumer digs. But you’re right. As of now, the USDA has decided that gene edited agricultural crops aren’t different enough from conventionally bred products; that they don’t need to be labeled differently because of this manipulation of DNA. I think some people think of it as less manipulation than what’s done using genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is enough manipulation that the government feels that’s a place where there’s enough change that they feel consumers do need to know that information. While the gene editing, the level of manipulation is less, or they consider it not enough to warrant labels to consumers. Q: Part of your study is looking to see if consumers will pay a reduced price if the product is gene edited, but in the real world they wouldn’t be told that… A: So, I think this is part of the strategy before these products become available, I think we’re probably less concerned about how they react to the information versus before plant breeders start to adopt these technologies, what should
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Consumers, Grapes and Gene Editing Cornell’s Brad Rickard Sheds Light on What the Research Shows and What’s Yet to Be Learned
