Pairwise, a food and agriculture company that uses gene editing and CRISPR technology to transform plants and production systems, recently partnered with Bayer to license its leafy-greens blend edited with CRISPR to improve its flavor. The company says it also developed the first seedless, thornless blackberry variety using CRISPR.

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One of the first available Pairwise innovations was in leafy greens. A researcher at Pairwise used CRISPR to eliminate the spicy taste of mustard greens to help make them more palatable for use in salads and more.

“We were thinking about things that could help with people’s diets and nutrition and looking at the salad space,” [Pairwise co-founder and CEO Tom Adams] said. “We realized that people talk about eating kale, but they eat romaine and iceberg. Romaine and iceberg aren’t bad for you; they just don’t carry a lot of nutritional value and kale carries. I don’t mind kale, but it seems kind of tough … I don’t like the bitterness very much. We created this type of green very nutritious that’s basically a new type of salad.”

He says Pairwise got more than 3,000 consumers to fill out surveys on the greens, with about 91% indicating a willingness to buy the new greens and giving high marks for the benefits of gene editing.

“I think the finding there is you can really win over consumers by creating a tangible product that does something for them,” he said. “What we didn’t really do with the GMO product [I worked on previously], we were not really communicating to people with positive energy.”

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