There is almost zero additional profit margin to a grower unless he can sell direct to the customer and that customer is specifically looking for said trait. Uniform, beautiful looking tomatoes are usually greenhouse grown and carry a matching price. Field grown tomatoes are either for processing or will have a portion of the crop with blemishes that the market will want a discount.

Brix level meters, in my opinion, are going to be only interesting to a processor who is looking for a very specific ripeness before harvest. Everyone else is going to either be picking at breaker to 50% color for slicers, light full color for the rest. Final ripening will occur off the vine for most field grown tomatoes. Protected culture, namely greenhouse grown, has the luxury of more vine ripening due to lack of environmental pressure, but even then there is little final effect on flavors once past breaker.

Very marginal changes in brix can be seen with nutrition or environment change. It is almost all driven by genetics. Growers almost never have control over that outside of selecting varieties. Breeders get all the “work” there. The balancing act between flavor and shippability has been a major factor for breeders for half a century.

The best tasting tomatoes usually have poor shelf life, poor shipping characteristics or poor disease package. The opposite of that usually has poor taste or texture. Skim is too thick, lack of flavor, off flavor, too watery, to dry, etc. LOTS of effort is going into moving “heirloom” eating quality into varieties that have better “distribution” traits. Eventually the “gourmet” aspects of tomatoes that kept smaller producers in the game will be lost. All tomatoes will be acceptable quality and it will be simply a competition on price and we all know who wins there.

==> Thank you so much for such thoughtful feedback



What would be beneficial to many growers is in field nutrient analysis based on tissue sampling. This is currently too expensive for small growers and usually to time costly for rapid field adjustments. It is why, outside of very large crops of processing tomatoes, tissue testing doesn’t work for many growers.

==> That's our ambition with Nutriscope, as of today, and for tomato, Nutriscope is only calibrated for pH, Redox and conductivity, but we are currently improving our models and hope to add nutrients for tomatoes in september.