Climate change is threatening ketchup. AI could help save it
Hold on to your Heinz. The latest looming food shortage is likely to include ketchup, coming hard on the heels of last year’s potato chip crisis and runs on mustard (in France, at least). Three summers’ worth of unprecedented high heat in the world’s key tomato-producing regions—Australia, Spain, and California’s central valley—have led to a precipitous decline in tomato paste stocks, the key ingredient for ketchup and other condiments.
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Tomatoes thrive in high heat, but like humans, they need cool nights to rest, especially when they are in bloom. If the hot nights of a heat wave last more than a few days, as they have started to do in major tomato-producing regions, the delicate yellow flowers wither on the vine, along with any hopes for juicy red fruit a few weeks later. Unlike, say, cereal companies that can switch suppliers when local crop shortages loom, most tomato-based product producers have vertically integrated supply chains: they provide their own seeds to contract farmers who grow to spec, and then transport the crop to processing facilities nearby that also belong to the producers.
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We either have to adapt to life without the crops that make living worthwhile, or adapt those crops to our changing climate. Plant scientists like Alvarez are working on the latter. Upping stakes and moving to a better location isn’t always possible, says Alvarez. “For a lot of [tomato producers], the only option is to somehow change the biology of the plants themselves.” Alvarez is trying to do just that, using machine learning to come up with new crossbreeds better adapted to warming weather.
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