You know that moment when you bite into a supermarket tomato and it tastes like wet cardboard? It’s frustrating, right? Your grandparents probably remember a time when tomatoes actually tasted like something. They weren’t exaggerating those stories about juicy, flavorful tomatoes from their childhood gardens. Here’s the thing: tomatoes really did taste better decades ago, and scientists now know exactly why we lost that flavor – and they’re working hard to bring it back.
The Scientific Evidence: When and Why Flavor Disappeared
Commercial agriculture exploded after World War II, and tomato crops were bred for higher yields, disease resistance, redder color, and firmness. Let’s be real, nobody was thinking about taste during that rush for efficiency. Modern tomatoes lack sufficient sugars and volatile chemicals critical to better flavor, traits that have been lost during the past 50 years because breeders have not had the tools to routinely screen for flavor.
Thanks to modern breeding techniques, tomatoes have expanded in size as much as 1000-fold since they were domesticated. That’s an absolutely staggering transformation. Meanwhile, the large, plump, ruddy tomatoes available year-round in grocery stores taste much different than the small, multihued, berry-sized fruits that evolved more than 50 million years ago near Antarctica and were first domesticated in Central and South America some 2500 years ago.
The Uniform Ripening Mutation: Beauty Over Flavor
A genetic mutation that occurred about 70 years ago, and was then selected by breeders for its effect of causing tomatoes to ripen uniformly, came at the cost of less sugar and carotenoids in the fruit. This uniform ripening mutation became incredibly popular with commercial growers because it made harvest timing predictable and created those perfectly red tomatoes consumers expected to see on shelves.
The uniform ripening mutation, which commercial breeders select for, eliminates this protein in the fruit, therefore reducing sugar levels. This is an unintended consequence, explains research from the Boyce Thompson Institute. Farmers pluck the fruits from the vine before they are ripe, and for about 70 years breeders have selected tomatoes that are uniformly light green at that time. This makes it easier to spot the tomatoes that are ready to be harvested and ensures that, by the time they hit supermarket shelves, the fruits glow with an even red color.
The problem? Nature didn’t design tomatoes to ripen evenly. Naturally, tomatoes unevenly ripen, showing darker green patches when unripe and variable redness when ripe – traits that still show up in garden-variety and heirloom breeds. That green shoulder your grandmother’s tomatoes had? Turns out, that was where the best flavor compounds were developing.
Lost Genes, Lost Flavor: The Genetic Breakdown
Scientists at the University of Florida led a groundbreaking study to understand exactly what went wrong. They sequenced the genomes of 398 tomato varieties including commercially grown versions as well as wild, ancestral tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes. The results were eye-opening. By asking a panel of consumers to rate over a hundred varieties of tomato, the researchers identified 13 volatiles that play an important role in producing the most appealing flavors.
They found almost 5,000 missing genes that explain why that store-bought tomato almost always lacks a certain zing. Think about that for a second. Nearly five thousand genes just vanished from our food supply because nobody was checking if the tomatoes still tasted good.
Another gene, TomLoxC, controls the levels of apocarotenoids and is critical for tomato flavor. The genes that support TomLoxC variations that account for high apocarotenoids and better flavor were lost as the tomato was domesticated and bred for size, shape, disease resistance and shelf life. The rare version of TomLoxC used to only be present in about 2 percent of tomato varieties. But in recent years, as breeders have begun to focus more on flavor, more and more modern tomato varieties have the gene. Nowadays, about 7 percent of tomatoes have it, meaning breeders have started selecting for it.
The Size Problem: Bigger Isn’t Better
In all that complexity, two factors may have outsize importance for tomato flavor: size and sugar. As you might expect, sugar makes tomatoes taste better. And the bigger a tomato, the less sugar you tend to find in it. It’s basically a dilution effect, similar to watering down a glass of juice.
Smaller fruit tended to have greater sugar content, suggesting that selection for more sizable tomatoes has come at the cost of sweetness and flavor. Honestly, it makes sense when you think about it. A plant has only so much energy to put into its fruits. Spread that energy across a massive beefsteak tomato versus a tiny cherry tomato, and the concentration of flavor compounds drops dramatically.
The studies show that as plants get bigger and the fruits and vegetables get bigger and more plentiful, everything gets diluted. This isn’t just about tomatoes either. In 1950, you could eat a handful of string beans and get about 9 percent of the calcium you needed for the day. Almost 50 years later, in 1999, the amount of calcium in string beans had gone down by 43 percent, leaving you with only 5 percent of your daily calcium.
Volatile Compounds: The Secret to Tomato Aroma
More than 400 volatiles have been detected in tomato. Empirical studies, including extensive biochemical characterization and trained consumer panels, have shown that only 20 to 30 volatiles are correlated to consumer liking. These volatile compounds drift into our noses when we bite into a tomato, creating what we perceive as flavor. Without them, tomatoes taste flat and boring.
Poor flavor of the modern varieties was associated with reduced levels of sugars, organic acids, and volatile compounds, including β-ionone, E-2-hexenal, 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, and phenylacetaldehyde. These chemical names might sound complicated, but they’re the building blocks of what makes a tomato taste amazing. These molecules were significantly reduced in modern tomato varieties compared to the heirloom ones.
A less prevalent volatile compound called geranial made a huge difference. Geranial somehow improves a tomato’s overall flavor, perhaps by enhancing innate sweetness. Compared with heirloom varieties, standard tomatoes have less geranial and other volatile compounds. It’s kind of like the difference between listening to a full orchestra versus just the string section. You’re missing crucial instruments.
The Supply Chain Sacrifice: Refrigeration and Early Harvest
The problems don’t end with genetics. Modern agricultural practices pile on additional flavor destruction. The final nail in the flavor coffin is refrigeration. Despite knowing it ruins the taste by reducing the volatiles so crucial for good flavor, wholesalers and retailers refrigerate tomatoes to prolong shelf-life during distribution.
The real culprit affecting tomato flavor is a production system that picks tomatoes before they are ripe, because that changes the ripening process. Even for the mature green tomatoes, postharvest ethylene gassing by itself cannot fully substitute for the flavor developed by true vine ripening. For example, green fruit receives most of its sugar from leaves, but also has chloroplasts that, when bathed in sunshine, can make more sugar directly within the fruit. Picked and stored fruit, of course, is stored in the dark, and thus neither receives nor produces sugar.
You can’t fake sunshine in a warehouse. That’s just reality.
The Economics of Bland: Why Growers Don’t Care About Taste
The problem is that breeders and growers have neither incentive nor tools to ensure the taste quality of their tomato varieties. Breeders focus on appearance, firmness, shelf life, disease resistance and yield, while growers are paid for how many pounds they pick but don’t pay a penalty for lousy fruit. So, the flavor has deteriorated slowly due to neglect.
Producers currently don’t get a penny more for quality, explained one researcher bluntly. This economic reality shaped everything about modern tomato production. A USDA official declared, you may not like the taste of these tomatoes, but your children will never know the difference. That’s a chilling statement about how we’ve normalized mediocrity.
Today, tomatoes are bred to travel long distances without getting bruised and sit in storage without going bad. The entire system prioritizes durability and visual appeal over actual eating quality. Who cares if it tastes good if it arrives at the store looking perfect?
Heirloom Tomatoes: A Window into the Past
It isn’t nostalgia that makes heirlooms taste better. It’s chemistry. Most are indeterminate, meaning they keep putting on new growth until they die. The more foliage a plant has in relation to fruit, the better the flavor, because leaves manufacture the sugars and acids that end up in the fruit.
One big 2017 study analyzed a whopping 398 tomato varieties and concluded that modern fruits do indeed lack the genetic ability to produce various important flavor compounds. A tomato’s flavor depends not only on the balance of sugars and acids within the fruit but also on subtle fragrant compounds – many of which are lacking in the modern supermarket tomato.
Heirloom plants have been chosen over generations based on taste since distance and time associated with garden to table is very short. That’s the crucial difference. When you’re selling tomatoes at a local farmers market the same day you pick them, flavor matters. When you’re shipping them across the country, it doesn’t.
CRISPR and Gene Editing: The Next Frontier
Using CRISPR/Cas9, it was shown that FLORAL4 was important for phenylalanine-derived volatile accumulation in tomato fruit. Similarly, editing the Sl-LIP8 gene could significantly alter the levels of various volatile organic compounds in tomato fruit. CRISPR/Cas9 showed that NAC transcription factors regulate fruit flavor ester biosynthesis. Compared to conventional breeding, CRISPR-edited tomatoes could be used to precisely engineer genes in flavor compound biosynthetic genes to improve aroma and flavor of modern commercial tomato varieties.
Gene editing offers a faster, more precise path forward than traditional breeding alone. Scientists can now target specific genes responsible for flavor compounds without waiting multiple generations for breeding crosses to work out. SlYTH1 positively regulates tomato flavor by stabilizing transcripts of enzymes involved in the synthesis of 2-isobutylthiazol volatile, a well-known enhancer for tomato flavor, discovered researchers in a recent 2025 study.
The technology exists. The knowledge exists. Whether we’ll see widespread implementation depends largely on consumer demand and grower economics. But the scientific foundation for tastier tomatoes is solid.
What This Means for the Future of Food
Breeding a better tomato will take time. The genetic traits discovered in the study may take three or four years to produce new varieties. That timeline puts us right around now for varieties based on the 2017 landmark research. Certain tomato breeders have tried to re-emphasize taste for commercial production. The result has been cultivars like Tasti-Lee and further research into the next great tasting tomato available in the grocer’s section.
An appropriate balance of sugars and organic acids as well as a rich and diverse volatile profile must be achieved to improve modern varieties that are considered less flavorful than heirlooms. Unlike sugars and acids, most volatiles are active at picomolar to nanomolar concentrations, which would permit flavor improvement without compromising yield. That’s actually encouraging news. We don’t need massive changes to make a big difference in flavor perception.
The tomato’s journey from flavorful fruit to bland commodity and potentially back again tells a broader story about industrial agriculture and what we value in our food. Can we have both efficiency and quality? Science suggests yes, but it requires conscious choice and willingness to prioritize flavor alongside other traits.
What would you pay for a tomato that actually tastes like your grandmother remembers? That question might determine whether these scientific advances make it from the lab to your kitchen. The tools exist to fix what decades of breeding broke. The question is whether we’ll use them.
