You may never have to pick out seeds from your fruit again

It’s the bite that betrays the limits of human progress: sinking your teeth into a mandarin, mouth filling with sweet juice, before the experience is derailed by the arrival of a slimy seed. We can fly in metal through the air and plumb the ocean’s depths, but we can’t eat some citrus unencumbered?
Seeds have for millennia been the unavoidable center of most of the fruit and vegetables we eat. They have, of course, survived for a reason, being vital to the life cycle of these plants. But today, startups utilizing the latest in gene-editing technology are working to banish them entirely, hoping to make eating fruit more appealing and thereby help improve human diets and perhaps reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.
In June, Pairwise, a North Carolina-based agritech company, achieved what they say is a “world first” in creating the seedless blackberry, excising the hard seeds from the fruit along with their exterior thorns, which can stick when they’re pulled from the branch. If saving consumers from a sharp prod in the gums sounds good, it’s only the beginning, says Tom Adams, Pairwise’s CEO. Over the next decade, they plan to remove pits from cherries and plums, and stones from mangos and avocados, taking on the fruit and vegetable-growing big beasts in the process.
The ambition is no less than revolutionizing the future of fruit — and, these companies hope, making it easier for all of us to eat more of it.
Pairwise’s seedless blackberry has been developed using CRISPR-Cas9 — billed as “programmable DNA scissors” capable of adding, removing, or altering parts of the genome — to cut its seed and thorn-triggering genes. (Cas9 won its creators, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, eight years after they published their seminal paper on the technology. Doudna is also a 2022 Future Perfect 50 honoree.)
Though initially targeted at accelerating medical research for the likes of cancer and mental illness, scientists soon grew excited about the possibilities for other applications, CRISPR-edited seedless fruit among them. While business is the primary aim, those working in the field see wider benefits: improving global diets at a time when most people fail to eat enough fruit and vegetables, alleviating pressure on the environment by requiring less water and land than meat production, and enhancing shelf life, thereby cutting food waste.
Seedless blackberries and stone-free fruit could make those things happen. But skeptics warn there could be unintended trade-offs and the purported benefits may be more hype than reality. Animal, not plant, agriculture is the larger driver of greenhouse gas emissions. The companies also need to make a profit off their enhanced fruits — but the higher prices might make those alternatives commercially unviable. There is also the risk that seedless fruits, which are grown from cuttings, could impact our ecosystem by reducing the genetic diversity of plants.
Pairwise and its peers hold world-changing ambitions. But they still need to prove their products are more than a passing novelty.
Andrew Allan, professor of biological sciences at the University of Auckland, recalls the “massive” hubbub about CRISPR’s potential among his peers in 2012, when Doudna and Charpentier’s paper was published. “Across all the labs; the scientists, biologists of the world, we could see medical uses, we could see agricultural uses, we could see horticultural uses.”
Initially, Allan says, “the CRISPR-Cas9 revolution was just about discovery.” Researchers ordered in the equipment and tinkered with genes to see what results they might yield, without any intention of creating a commercial product at the end. But when companies realized that scientists could snip out the DNA segments triggering shorter shelf lives in bananas, for example, or for the seeds filling mandarin segments, they saw a business opportunity.
Farmers have experimented with growing seedless produce for centuries, but CRISPR-Cas9 has radically sped up the process. Previously, it could take seven or eight years to identify the gene that might be triggering seed growth, Allan explains, with another couple of decades to get the breeding program fully up and running. Using CRISPR “can take just a year.”
That is promising news for the reams of people posting that they are “annoyed by [seeds] interrupting my chewing” and “seeded fruits are irksome” (which were not written by me, but certainly echo my sentiments).
Adams says Pairwise’s creation of seedless fruits came with the goal of fixing one problem: “that people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables.” According to the USDA, just 10 percent of American adults eat the recommended five servings of fruit and vegetables per day. (In the UK and Ireland, that figure is 33 percent — the highest in the developed world, per a 2023 report). The most commonly eaten vegetables in the US are potatoes (or as they’re also known where I come from, chips); they do hold some nutritional value, but are not the healthiest produce for humans to eat.
Affordability and availability repeatedly come up as the main roadblocks that prevent consumers from eating more fruits and veggies. Adams had another barrier to add to the list: convenience. Having to think about where to spit out cherry pits or discard your peach stone can be enough to make buyers (and eaters) think twice.
Meanwhile, seedless versions of beloved produce have in the past driven up consumption of fruits and vegetables — most notably with grapes. Only a few years ago, most of us would chomp straight through a brightly colored orb knowing a hard inner core cruelly awaited; it’s now harder to find seeded grapes in much of the West than their genetically enhanced relation. Seedless grapes now account for 80 percent of the fruit cultivated globally, and could well be responsible for consumption per capita during the 2022-23 season reaching its highest point for more than two decades. Adams adds that the likes of Cuties and Halos — seedless, easily peelable mandarins — have taken citrus from a “shrinking category” to a booming one: they are the second-most consumed fruit in the US, while easy-peeling citrus varieties are predicted to outsell navel oranges for the first time, with consumption at around 7 pounds per person per year.
Given our predilection for instant gratification, cutting out seeds could alter the American diet for the better. “If you think about how lifestyles are changed, you’re on the go, you eat something that is convenient, that you don’t have to prepare. And so that’s where a lot of the innovation in fruits and vegetables are going,” says Lauren Scott, executive director of the Foundation for Fresh Produce, a nonprofit industry group.
The US is already the largest per-capita consumer of freshly cut produce, like bagged salads and chopped melon. “If you completely remove the seeds [from blackberries], you’re removing a barrier for people who may not have eaten the product in the past,” says Scott.
Where their blackberries have gone, Pairwise hopes cherries will follow. Removing pits was in fact their first big idea — but it turned out to be harder than expected, Adams says. For one, It takes longer for trees to grow and bear fruit than smaller plants. Pits also present a distinct challenge because they are formed from the hardening of a different layer of tissue than seeds, making the editing process more complicated. So in the interim, they began casting around for other seeded fruits that could produce results more quickly, landing on the cane berries: blackberries and raspberries.
Among blackberry-eaters in North America, unpublished research commissioned by the company showed that 84 percent of them don’t like the seeds in blackberries. That’s the potential customer base and, importantly, Pairwise says removing the seeds has no effect on the fruit’s taste.
“We’ve been able to figure out which genes determine that hard pit and basically eliminate their action so that now we make a soft-seeded blackberry,” Adams says. It has been in development for five years, with an estimated few more to go before the seedless blackberries make it to market. At the same time, work is ongoing on their cherries.
In spite of the botanical differences between pits and seeds, the progress made with blackberries is proof of concept, Adams believes, applicable to cherries, plums, and any other stone fruit you can think of.
“This is within reach. I don’t know if it’s 10 years or 20 years before you see versions of all of the things that we know as stone fruits without stones. I don’t know if we have to come up with a new name for them when they don’t have stones anymore,” he muses. “I don’t think it’s an impossible thing to dream about, it just does take time to do that.”
These agricultural breakthroughs are a bragging point or no-go area, depending on who you ask. Allan, a plant genomicist for more than 30 years, says that the use of CRISPR technology in the US and UK typically doesn’t constitute genetic modification, making Pairwise’s blackberry GMO-free. But he adds that concerns arise when people hear of changes to — or, as they might think of it, interference with — our food.
“There’s a group of consumers who are very worried about scientists being involved in their food supply,” he says. “When a scientist makes those changes, everybody seems to get worried. And the answer is difficult to unpack.” Some commentators have already expressed concern that seedless fruit which has been “tampered with” is of less nutritional value, which has been rebutted by botanists.
DNA shifts within the food supply are actually common, caused naturally by changes within the fields they’re grown or alterations to the breeding program. Donut peaches, for instance, are now a commonly enjoyed form of the fruit after emerging as the result of a natural mutation — a word Allan has nevertheless been warned “never to use” because of the negative connotations.
But “when a scientist makes a bit of DNA change, people get upset,” he says.
Before CRISPR, producing seedless fruits usually required crossing two different types of a fruit to produce sterile offspring, a process called parthenocarpy. It’s been applied to the likes of bananas, which 200 years ago came with a thick line of seeds through their center; grapes and watermelon without seeds are also bred this way. These varieties are typically grown from the seedless cuttings to ensure any future fruit exactly matches its parents. Any lack of uniformity is commercially unhelpful to grocery stores, who require their fresh produce to look the same.
Companies have attempted to harness the benefits of seedlessness throughout the 20th century, with mixed success. In the late 1980s, Gerry Kelman worked in marketing at Zeraim Gedera, an Israeli agritech firm, when a near-seedless pepper was developed in “a stroke of luck from the breeder,” Kelman said. They were confident that was a desirable trait, but unsure exactly how.
Kelman then went on an information-gathering mission in the UK, meeting product managers at grocery chains to find out what consumers really wanted. “I kept on saying, what are you looking for in vegetables that you don’t have?” he recalls. “The first thing they wanted was strawberries with cream inside.” (Sadly, there is no breeding program for cream; cucumbers with drier insides were also floated.)
But one “very charismatic” manager insisted that peppers without seeds should be top of the list. Kelman said that in Israel, they had been working on varieties with the vast majority of the seeds gone. “And he said, ‘One seed is as good as a thousand seeds. We need no seeds.’”
Kelman shared that feedback with his company and, thanks to the “excellent eye” of the breeder, the seeds were ultimately bred out. It was skilled work, but not quick; it took around a decade to produce the seedless peppers on a large scale, and they didn’t reach shelves in the UK and the Netherlands until the early 2010s.
At that time, the firm was “very much on their own,” Kelman reflects. Supermarket shelves today, however, reveal that many more companies are now giving it a go.
Still, from singling out seed-causing genes to starting up large-scale breeding programs and battling more unpredictable weather, challenges remain for this fledgling industry. Eminent Seeds, a Dutch brand, is working on sweet mini peppers that will take “at least two years” to hit shelves, says Roy van Kester, Eminent’s sales manager. Breaching the seedless frontier does not come easily.
“Everybody wants to have vegetables without seeds,” van Kester says, but “the consumer is not willing to pay a lot of extra for it.” As such, producers will only bring their product to market if they can launch it around a similar price point to its competitors.
Right now, the seedless varieties on the market are also less disease-resistant than seeded kinds, and have a lower yield per square foot (van Kester estimates the shortfall being around 30 percent). “That means that the cost price is higher. When the cost price is higher, somebody has to pay for it,” he says. Even among varieties where the code appeared to have been cracked, seedlessness is “very challenging for everybody.”
That hasn’t deterred them, obviously. Nor Pairwise, whose broader pitless aspirations might not only improve health but reduce choking hazards for babies, Adams says. They could also help eliminate avocado hand injuries, the inopportune slip of knife that has, in some cases, led to entire fingers being lopped off.
Technology may not only serve to enhance the fruit we have, but create new possibilities. Proponents are already imagining future generations of fruits free of seeds to follow.
Apples without cores are “a target” for companies in the industry, Allan says. Kelman heard back during his British tour in the early 1990s that “melons with edible peel” were highly sought after. “We’re actually very close to that,” he says. The idea would ultimately be to shrink the melons to around a fifth of the current average size, something similar to an apple that you can “put it in your lunch bag and eat it at the desk.”
While the potential for innovation seems vast, investments have not flowed so freely to seedless fruit startups when compared to plant-based meat alternatives. This may in part be due to timing: firms looking to make quick financial gains will hardly be attracted to a 20-year mango-growing plan, nor the whims of our hotter, wetter weather. Allan thinks that, while scientific research in the area is growing, legislation is proving the enemy of progress. Widespread investment — even the couple of million dollars many seemingly half-baked startups accrue — “hasn’t happened because the investors say, ‘Well, there’s no clear route to market because the regulations are all messy,’” he says. That’s left the market largely to bigger established companies, which narrows the opportunity for innovation and competition. As well as allowing the field to become more “diverse,” less-established firms can be more “nimble” where products and consumer demand are concerned, Allan adds.
Inevitably, the smaller and more rarefied the seedless industry remains, the more expensive the end product will be — something that will only deter consumers, especially given the recent inflation in grocery prices. Pairwise’s communications director says that they expect their blackberries will be priced “with a premium to conventional, but less than organic.” (This is a shift from early seedless citrus varieties hitting shelves in 2007, where they could command a premium three or four times higher than their predecessors.) Russell Tronstad, a professor specializing in agricultural economics at the University of Arizona, said in an email that a new innards-free entrant to the market “could conceivably [have a monopoly] in the future where a company has a patent on how to produce [a] seedless variety,” keeping prices higher, but that this will likely fall once others follow suit.
Pairwise believes the environmental benefits of their product will draw in conscious consumers, but not everyone is convinced, pointing to potential downsides. Marco Springmann, senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, says that “looking for more climate resilient options is surely a good thing. However, I would say that could also be done without the use of gene editing,” adding that some seedless companies’ claims about the climate are “hot air.”
Where fruits and vegetables are concerned, “it doesn’t matter very much how much you tinker with production, [the climate impact] is already very low,” Springmann said. The imperative “is really to reduce the consumption and production of animal-source foods.” (The UN says that plant-based foods “use less energy, land, and water, and have lower greenhouse gas intensities than animal-based foods,” with 1.6 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions emitted per kilogram of fruit and vegetables grown, compared to 70.6 kilograms for beef alone.)
Gene-editing could also have implications for growers in less-developed parts of the world; 60 percent of fruit in the US is imported, primarily from Mexico, Peru, and Chile. This “puts farmers into greater dependencies,” he adds, as they are often made to sign agreements that they won’t breed seedless varieties themselves. For those in low- and middle-income countries in particular, he says, “I would regard the use of gene editing as not necessarily a step in the right direction.”
Springmann adds that he would “very much doubt” if seedless fruit and vegetables had a significant impact on our health, either. “There are probably a variety of reasons why fruits and vegetables are not eaten very much, but the most obvious ones are probably to be found in the general food environment, where if people go to a supermarket, they’re confronted with a plethora of ultra-processed foods that are marketed and made very appealing.”
Tronstad says that seedless fruits and vegetables will likely replace existing products, rather than expand healthy ranges available for consumers. “The consumer’s always going to choose seedless; that’s just kind of common sense, but that’s what we’ve seen in the marketplace. I don’t think there’s probably any going back.”
But those in the field are confident they can convert some of those people who often avoid fruit for fear of what lies within. And that could be a step toward improving our health. For Allan, ridding fresh produce of seeds is “a win for the environment. It’s a win for the consumer. So I love it.”