Wal-Mart Teams With Bayer To Create A Designer Cantaloupe
June 15, 2017 | 1 min to read
Not even Wal-Mart likes the cantaloupes it sells in winter.
“They’re engineered to make a 3,000-mile trip, so they look good but taste like a piece of wood,’’ said Shawn Baldwin, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s senior vice president for produce and global food sourcing. “So we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have that summer melon taste in the fall?’”
Wal-Mart says it typically sells 10 times more cantaloupes in June, when it can buy from U.S. farms, than it does in December, when the melons are grown farther south. Most retailers don’t have the mojo to do anything about it.
But Wal-Mart is the biggest U.S. grocer. If it wants to sell a cantaloupe off-season that tastes as sweet and juicy as in summer — and keeps it a step ahead of discount competitors nipping at its heels — it gets to.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Bloomberg