Seeds only a plant breeder could love, until now.
When his children were small, Irwin Goldman wanted to give them a beet to snack on — a beet so pretty and swirled with colors, so juicy and delicious, that they’d crunch on it raw.
So Goldman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew the beet himself. He used traditional breeding methods, cross-pollinating flowers, selecting for sweetness, mild earthiness and mellowness.
It took him almost 15 years to develop the Badger Flame, a stunning oblong beet with swirls of deep orange. Then he hit a wall.
“I might have a novelty I’m really excited about, but unless a seed company wants to market it, it doesn’t go anywhere,” Goldman said. “It’s a huge gap in the business.”
Row 7 Seed Co., a new business cofounded by Dan Barber, the executive chef at Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., aims to fill that gap by developing, promoting and selling seeds for new vegetable and grain varieties that might otherwise never find an audience.
Plenty of companies, small and large, work with university plant breeders to distribute new seed varieties. But Row 7 aims to give breeders the chance to reach a big market with their most esoteric and groundbreaking work — by connecting them with chefs.
As they develop new varieties, plant breeders will kick around ideas with chefs across the country, using feedback from the kitchen to guide their research. While Row 7 will consider the needs of regional growers, its founders say that flavor will always come first.
“Part of the goal of the company is not only to increase the flavor of vegetables: It’s to look at how we, as chefs, can change the culture of eating,” said Barber, who started Row 7 with seedsman Matthew Goldfarb and plant breeder Michael Mazourek.
Starting Tuesday, Row 7 began selling organic seeds, developed in the United States, on its website, row7seeds.com. For now, it is selling seeds for the Badger Flame; three varieties of squash (including one that announces its ripeness on the vine by changing from dark green to a rusty orange); a small, creamy potato; a pleasingly bitter cucumber; and a floral-tasting habanero pepper without even a pinprick of heat.
Row 7’s founders are betting that as plant breeders and chefs conspire to grow what’s most delicious, they will grab the attention of home gardeners and small- to midscale farmers, who can order the seed in bulk. Their new varieties may then pop up at farmers’ markets and high-end grocery stores, and, if demand is high enough, in national supermarket chains and manufactured foods.
It sounds ambitious for a new company with such a small selection, not to mention one whose prices are high, from $3.50 for 100 seeds to $4.95 for just 12. But the founders have seen what happens when high-profile chefs flex their marketing muscles.
Eight years ago, Barber asked Mazourek, an associate professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University, if he could develop a better butternut squash. Mazourek had been working on what he calls “squash innovation” for many years, and came back to Barber with the Honeynut. Like all breeders, Mazourek had reached plenty of dead ends throughout his career. He didn’t see why this miniature squash should be any different, even if it was notably cute and tasty.
But Barber pitched the new variety, calling it out by name at food conferences and cooking with it at his restaurants, where the servers tell dinners detailed stories about ingredients. The squash elbowed its way beyond an elite dining scene, through more