Pod Insights Gastropod Canned Tomatoes and the Myth of the San Marzano About this episode Canned tomatoes are a perfect winter food. As you'll know from our tomato episode, the beautiful fruits in fresh aisle of the supermarket are mostly flavorless outside of the summer season—but the tomatoes that get packed in a can are cheap, readily available, and, most importantly, delicious year-round. This episode, we have the stories of how turtle poop, full English fry-ups, and an Italian romance helped turn the canned tomato into a pantry hero. Plus, are San Marzanos really the best tasting option out there? We've got the juicy tips you need to score the ultimate tomato fix, no matter the season!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 9,503 words · 22 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 We're gonna pull a plant right now, so I can show you guys what we do every day. So, you can see here, you can see some tomatoes on top, right? It looks nice. But, where the real magic is, under here. That's where you really see everything.
0:18 Nicola Twilley? It's so nuts, how many tomatoes there are. I'm really shocked.
0:22 Speaker 00 You guys wanna hold it?
0:23 Nicola Twilley? Sure. Oh my god.
0:27 Speaker 00 It's a good workout, for sure.
0:29 Nicola Twilley? There's a lot of tomatoes.
0:32 Cynthia Graber? Wow, that weighs tons.
0:34 Nicola Twilley? It's like buried treasure.
0:36 Cynthia Graber? Nikki and I had each hepted a massive tomato plant into the air, and we were loaded up to our elbows in bright red fruit. It was truly amazing.
0:44 Nicola Twilley? And what made it even more amazing was this was just two plants in a field full of them, all covered in perfect red plum-shaped tomatoes. But you could hardly see any of them until you lifted the plants up into the air. From the surface, it was just a carpet of green.
1:01 Cynthia Graber? We were visiting this tomato field because we promised you a full episode all about canned tomatoes. We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.
1:12 Nicola Twilley? And I'm Nicola Twilley. And after having so much fun getting into the story of fresh tomatoes and how they lost their flavor last summer, we are back with a winter-themed take on our favorite fruit that's really more of a vegetable.
1:25 Cynthia Graber? What do the Civil War and Galapagos turtles have to do with the development of this pantry staple? And are San Marzano's all they're cracked up to be?
1:32 Nicola Twilley? This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
1:48 Speaker 03 When is the end of the day? And you're settled into the couch looking for your evening watch? You're not looking for Homework the Movie. You're looking for comfort, excitement, or something in between. Whether you're craving something familiar or in the mood to discover something new, Amazon Prime has what you need, from screen to doorstep. Because it's not just about genres or endless content. It's about finding the thing that matches how you're feeling, whatever the mood. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.
2:22 Speaker 04 I'm Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't. Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands, deep tech that changes the weather.
2:41 Speaker 05 Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.
2:44 Speaker 04 We've got hardware that helps blind people see and dairy.
2:48 Speaker 06 I never imagined my life journey would be milk.
2:51 Speaker 04 Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.
2:59 Speaker 00 We are in Linden, California, at a beautiful tomato field, ready to get picked.
3:05 Cynthia Graber? Last September, Nikki and I met Juan Rios. He's the agronomist for Stanislas Food Products. We joined him in a field near Modesto in California's Central Valley.
3:12 Nicola Twilley? And this particular field had a bumper crop. It was, like we keep saying, amazing.
3:19 Cynthia Graber? It's an amazing amount of tomatoes buried under all this green. It's really, really surprising. Like a thick mat of like a foot of tomatoes, two feet of tomatoes.
3:30 Nicola Twilley? And when he said carpet, it is, it is exactly. It's almost like a lasagna layer of tomatoes topped with green.
3:40 Nicola Twilley? I just stood on a tomato and I feel terrible.
3:43 Cynthia Graber? We both felt a little weird because it was impossible to walk through the field without walking on tomatoes. And why would we want to trample beautiful, perfect looking tomatoes? But for one, that's a part of the job he kind of enjoys.
3:55 Speaker 00 You want to know actually a funny part about standing on the tomatoes? Is doing this enough? You have to walk on some of the plants itself when you're kind of across the field. So I can actually start telling how heavy a crop's going to be by walking on top of it because you're not going to feel the ground. You just start floating on tomatoes.
4:11 Nicola Twilley? We really were just floating on gorgeous jewel-like tomatoes. I mean, truly, this was kind of like tomato heaven. Which I'd like to point out is very, very different from what you see when you're looking at a field of eating tomatoes in Florida.
4:25 Cynthia Graber? As you might remember from our tomato episode last summer, Florida tomatoes, the ones that are destined for the fresh section of supermarket shelves around the country, they are all picked green and hard as a baseball. They are deliberately not ripe, whereas these canning tomatoes were fully ripe.
4:39 Nicola Twilley? Which is why they were being crushed under our feet, much to our devastation. Fortunately, one wasn't bothered at all. There were just so many tomatoes all ready at once. That's kind of what tomatoes do.
4:52 Speaker 07 You know, if you've grown tomatoes, you know that their habit is they come in slowly. And then all of a sudden, you get a couple of hot days and they come in like gangbusters.
5:04 Nicola Twilley? Bill Alexander is the author of 10 Tomatoes That Changed the World. And he says this tendency of tomatoes to gift us this incredible abundance all at once, this was a problem in the mid 1800s when tomatoes first became super popular in the US.
5:18 Speaker 07 There would be a glut. And the price of tomatoes would drop so much that they would just sometimes plow them into the fields.
5:29 Nicola Twilley? I know, it's horrifying. But then, and this is a story we've told on the show before, in the 1800s, the tin can came along.
5:37 Speaker 07 Now, canning started when Napoleon sponsored a contest around 1800 for someone who could come up with a way for his troops to carry foods into battle that would not spoil.
5:52 Speaker 08 Of course, all growing things are contained within a protective covering. But it occurred to man that if he could provide a permanent protective covering for the bounty of nature, he could then readily extend the harvest season until every day in the year became a day of plenty. A simple idea, but one of great promise. Today, its perfection is a man-made miracle. We refer to it, and rightly so, as the miracle of the can.
6:27 Nicola Twilley? But it took a while for this miraculous technology to catch on. There were various developments along the way. And a particularly important one was the invention of the can opener in the 1850s, which was perfect timing.
6:39 Speaker 07 All of this was in place now for, just prior to the Civil War, when tomatoes were being grown like crazy. They were already at this point, the most popular vegetable in the United States.
6:54 Nicola Twilley? The first tomatoes were being put into cans in the US in the 1840s. A gentleman named Harrison Crosby of New Jersey filled metal pails with whole tomatoes, sealed them with a tin disc, and boiled them. He sent samples to Queen Victoria and President James Polk, as well as to hotels and restaurants in New York.
7:11 Cynthia Graber? They caught on. By the 1860s, there were factories in the North, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. These factories were producing cans, and so Union soldiers could take those cans into battle as part of their rations.
7:22 Speaker 07 Which were always a prized bounty for the Confederate troops, who had to rely on raiding the towns and getting all of their food from the local population. And it was also the first time that many Americans, either in the North or the South, had tasted canned tomatoes. And so when they came out of the war, they actually wanted to keep eating them. And that's when canning really takes off after the war.
7:50 Cynthia Graber? The war ended in 1865, and by 1870, 100 canneries were producing 30 million cans of tomatoes a year. It's nowhere near what's produced today, but tomato canning had grown exponentially in just a few years. Soon, there were more tomatoes being canned than any other fruit or vegetable.
8:06 Nicola Twilley? And this is the moment the canned tomato becomes an icon.
8:10 Speaker 07 Shortly after the Civil War, Joseph Campbell joins this canning company in Southern Jersey, buys out partner after a couple of years. And his conceit was that he wanted to make canned goods that were special. You could buy nowhere else.
8:33 Nicola Twilley? Joseph Campbell is, in fact, the Campbell of, yes, Campbell's Tomato Soup. He had been working at a fruit and veg company, and then he joined a canning company as partner.
8:43 Speaker 07 And one of the things that he did was he had a single beefsteak tomato, a term, by the way, that he owned the copyright to. A single giant beefsteak tomato in a can, which he marketed as Campbell's Celebrated Beefsteak Tomato. Example, perhaps, of one of the first, like, real branded foods.
9:10 Cynthia Graber? You can kind of picture what this canned tomato would have been like. Beefsteak tomatoes are known to be large and round, and the company just skinned and cooked those and stuck each one in its own can. These weren't their only products. They also had canned vegetables called strictly fancy small peas and fancy asparagus.
9:24 Nicola Twilley? In the 1890s, Campbell stepped down. A guy called Arthur Dorance took over as president. And his nephew, John, who was a chemist with a degree from MIT, joined the company.
9:34 Speaker 07 And it comes down to the idea of doing tomato soup, but condensed tomato soup, to which you would add a can of water to, and it would reconstitute back to full soup.
9:47 Cynthia Graber? And that was it. Canned tomatoes created one of the very first packaged convenience foods.
9:52 Speaker 07 It's very easy for the housewife. All she has to do is open it and take that same can, fill it with water, and you have a lunch.
10:03 Speaker 09 Campbell's takes the chill out of children. The way you know a wholesome hot soup should.
10:12 Speaker 10 Hot tomato soup gives them such good nourishment and flavor. They always eat better when you remember the soup. Reach for the Campbells. It's right on your shelf.
10:23 Speaker 07 And many of us are still doing the same thing today.
10:27 Nicola Twilley? The red and white Campbell's soup can is still an icon, thanks in part to Andy Warhol, who famously painted one canvas for every flavor in the 1960s. But the label wasn't originally red and white. The early Campbell's soup labels were a quite handsome dark blue and orange.
10:45 Cynthia Graber? But then, in the late 1890s, a guy named Herberton Williams, he was a Campbell's employee and apparently a football fan. He went to a Penn versus Cornell Thanksgiving Day football game, and he was inspired by the Cornell team's red and white uniforms. He suggested that for the can's new colors, and those labels have remained red and white ever since.
11:03 Nicola Twilley? The late 1890s was a busy time in the life of the canned tomato because the other thing that was happening was that lots of Italians were leaving Italy and emigrating in search of a better life. Lots of them ended up in the US, millions and millions.
11:18 Speaker 11 Well, when all of these immigrants left at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, they had more money than they had in Italy, which was, you know, very poor. They started like having this nostalgia for all their products, including canned tomatoes.
11:31 Cynthia Graber? Arthur Allen is the author of Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato. These Italian immigrants were living all around the world, in the US, in Argentina, in Australia, and they wanted the tomato products they'd eaten back home.
11:42 Nicola Twilley? Last time we talked tomato, we told you the Italians made something called conserva nera with their harvest, this super, super dense, thick, black, solid tomato paste. By the late 1800s, though, they'd switched to bottled, thinner paste, much more like what tomato paste is today.
11:59 Cynthia Graber? But then they started canning whole tomatoes for the British market. Brits, at this point, loved tomatoes. They even ate them for breakfast.
12:05 Nicola Twilley? Cynthia, everyone knows that a grilled tomato is a key part of the full English fry-up, which really got standardized at this exact time in the Edwardian era. In some ways, tomatoes were really the first vegetable that British people appreciated, outside of the potato, of course.
12:21 Cynthia Graber? No comment. But Brits couldn't get tomatoes in the winter, which was a bummer, until the Italians ratcheted out their canning prowess to meet the demand. And so, within only a few years, the industry had basically switched from canning paste to canning whole tomatoes, and the canning industry in Italy as a whole grew too.
12:37 Nicola Twilley? And although the Brits really kick-started the Italian tomato canning industry, Italian Americans hopped aboard soon after. Like Arthur said, they were merrily importing tomatoes from the homeland alongside all the cheeses and cured meats and olive oil they missed so much.
12:52 Cynthia Graber? But those tomatoes became harder to get a hold of in the 30s. First, there were tariffs, we all know how great those are. And then the US was boycotting Italian products because of the fascist Italian government and their invasion of Ethiopia. And then Mussolini scaled down tomato production in the country in order to grow more grain so Italy could be self-sufficient.
13:10 Speaker 12 And the Italians had been shipping tomatoes to the United States, and suddenly those imports were not coming in. And so, there was this opportunity. And who better to feel that opportunity than those who knew about Italian tomatoes, the Italians?
13:22 Nicola Twilley? This is Jeff Lundquist. He's a regional sales manager for Stanislaus. And seeing this demand, Italian Americans had started growing tomatoes to can them in Jersey and Pennsylvania, but also increasingly in California.
13:36 Cynthia Graber? Among those Italian Americans was the family that started Stanislaz. But Stanislaz doesn't sound Italian, and it's not actually their name. Ralph and Edna Corderoli started the company in 1942. At that point, there was one more strike against Italy. It was part of the Axis we were fighting in World War II.
13:51 Speaker 12 And having an Italian name in the United States was not the greatest thing at that time. So they saw that opportunity, jumped into it, but they were nervous about having their names on the businesses. You know, everything was rationed during that time. And they were concerned that they would be last on the list to be able to buy equipment.
14:15 Nicola Twilley? So the Corderolis named their new company after the county it was based in instead. Stanislaz County, California.
14:22 Cynthia Graber? At the time, their canned tomatoes were produced in a super hands-on manner, like all the canned tomatoes back then. It was mostly women and children working in the factory. They were doing things like coring the tomatoes and slipping skins off newly boiled tomatoes with their bare hands.
14:36 Nicola Twilley? Meanwhile, in the fields, a combination of Midwestern Dust Bowl refugees and Mexican immigrants picked every single fruit by hand. During World War II, California growers complained about labor shortages, to the point that the US government launched something called the Bracero Program to bring in Mexican laborers on a temporary basis to help get the harvests in.
14:57 Speaker 00 Before, this was all picked by hand into wooden crates. Those wooden crates would be put into trailers, taken to the canary, like unloaded by hand, and then dumped. So, I mean, that process just took a whole lot of time. And it's very labor-intensive.
15:11 Nicola Twilley? This kind of work was called stoop labor because it was so backbreaking. And the Bracero Program was sort of legendary for how exploitative it was. But most California tomato growers loved it because the Braceros were a cheap, easily-controlled, non-union labor force.
15:27 Cynthia Graber? But some people looked at how much labor it took to get the tomatoes from the field and then into the can, and they thought there had to be a better way. Mechanization would transform the tomato itself, and it had ripples throughout the entire United States. That's coming up after the break.
15:43 Speaker 04 I'm Josh Mucio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't.
15:54 Speaker 13 I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about like middleware AI wrappers.
16:00 Speaker 04 Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands. We're building Eight Sleep for daytime. Hardware that helps blind people see. They kept asking for middle finger. Next thing we knew, we had like 10 students running around flipping each other off. We've got deep tech to change the weather.
16:17 Speaker 05 Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.
16:20 Speaker 14 What if you wanted to not make it rain somewhere else? Like one day, we're just like, screw Arizona.
16:28 Speaker 04 And dairy?
16:29 Speaker 06 I never imagined my life journey would be milk.
16:32 Speaker 04 Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.
16:40 Speaker 15 Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.
17:19 Speaker 16 Hey Spotify listeners, when you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.
17:45 Nicola Twilley? At this point in history, in the 1940s, the tomato was in kind of a pickle. Not a literal one, however delicious that might be, but more of an existential one.
17:55 Cynthia Graber? The tomato was weak, genetically speaking. They were domesticated in Mesoamerica from only a small number of tomato plants out there in the wild. And then only some of those plants were taken to Europe and bred further, which created even more of a genetic bottleneck. And then only some of those tomatoes made it to America.
18:12 Speaker 07 That's the kind of genomic pool that we've been working with here. Probably represents less than 5% of the total tomato genome.
18:22 Nicola Twilley? Fortunately, one man, a kind of tomato Indiana Jones, was determined to turn things around. Meet Charlie Rick.
18:30 Speaker 07 Charlie Rick was head of the wonderfully named Truck Crop Division at UC Davis. And he would go to South America every year, drag his family down there in his beat up van. And he would look for specimens of tomatoes or even relatives tomato that we didn't have here.
18:55 Cynthia Graber? Charlie brought back tomatoes from his adventures in South America. He grew them out at the university and he looked for useful traits that he'd then breed into tomatoes here.
19:03 Speaker 07 In fact, almost all of tomatoes you buy today have some genes that were brought back to America by Charlie Rick.
19:12 Nicola Twilley? On one of Charlie's tomato collecting adventures, he went to the Galapagos Islands and picked up seeds from a wild tomato there.
19:19 Speaker 11 And he couldn't get the seeds to germinate. He tried planting them in different kinds of soils.
19:26 Speaker 07 He tried putting them through some finches, the ones that Darwin had written about. He still could not get them to germinate.
19:34 Cynthia Graber? Some seeds need to pass through an animal's digestive tract for them to germinate. So it made sense that Charlie thought that the Galapagos finches that Darwin made famous, maybe they'd get the tomato seeds going. But no.
19:45 Speaker 07 And he remembered that he had seen some Galapagos turtles wandering around the area where tomatoes were.
19:52 Speaker 11 And he had a friend at the University of California in San Francisco, who-- Had some Galapagos turtles, a couple of them. And so the friend would feed the seeds to the turtles.
20:05 Speaker 07 After about a month, because tortoises are, of course, notoriously slow in everything that they do. About a month later, he would send back the scat from the tortoise.
20:16 Cynthia Graber? Charlie searched through the turtle poop to look for tomato seeds, but he couldn't find them. And he wasn't even sure which batch of poop had the seeds. So he got the idea that he'd ask the friend to feed the turtle dyed lettuce leaves at the same time as the tomato seeds. It worked. When the dye showed up in the poop, there were definitely seeds there, too.
20:32 Nicola Twilley? And lo and behold, once these seeds had passed through the digestive system of a Galapagos turtle, they could finally be germinated.
20:40 Speaker 11 And, you know, this would just be an amusing. I mean, it is an amusing story. But also, these tomatoes that grew out of it contained this trait, which is called jointless petasol. And what it is, is it's something that allows the stem of the tomato to fall right off of the fruit. And this is key to making processing tomatoes.
21:04 Cynthia Graber? Almost every other tomato at the time had a joint in the stem not far from the fruit. It meant that when you picked the fruit, a little bit of the stem would come off with it. And that was another thing that had to be removed in the canning process.
21:14 Nicola Twilley? It was also a pokey thing that would stick into other tomatoes in the harvest bucket, and those holes would lead to rot. Basically, all bad.
21:22 Cynthia Graber? But the Galapagos tomato didn't have that joint in the stem. And so the tomato would just come off cleanly right at the fruit.
21:28 Nicola Twilley? This jointless petasol gene wasn't something Charlie was specifically looking for, but it was very handy because one of his colleagues at UC Davis, this guy called Jack Hanna, he had decided he wanted to optimize the tomato harvest. And this was one of the issues he needed to fix.
21:45 Speaker 11 He was Texas-born, you know, farm kid, who was just totally.
21:52 Speaker 11 Unsentimental about farming and, you know, it was all about efficiency. But he had this idea to create a harvestable, you know, mechanically harvestable tomato.
22:03 Cynthia Graber? At the time, nobody really took Jack seriously. Tomatoes were notoriously mushy things. You know, if you didn't like a politician, you might throw a tomato at him and it would splat. A hard tomato that could be picked up by a machine, that sounded totally ludicrous.
22:16 Nicola Twilley? But Jack was not a man to be deterred by other people's lack of faith. He decided the problem needed to be tackled from two angles. Somebody needed to invent a machine, but also he needed to reinvent the tomato.
22:29 Speaker 11 The tomato had to have a lot of very specific qualities.
22:33 Cynthia Graber? One of them was that it had to have that jointless gene. So only the fruit would come off the stem. Ideally, it also wouldn't have a white core because that was something canners had to cut out. And fortunately, Charlie Rick had found a tomato that was kind of oval shaped that had no white core.
22:46 Nicola Twilley? The list goes on. An optimized tomato plant should have fruit that all ripened at the same time.
22:52 Speaker 11 That's ideal for processing because when you go through the field, you're harvesting the whole plant. So you want as many of those tomatoes to be ripe as possible.
23:01 Nicola Twilley? Amazingly, the gene that made the tomatoes on a plant all ripen at the same time also had another extraordinarily useful effect. It made the tomato plant what is called determinant, which means that rather than just growing and fruiting and growing some more and fruiting some more all season long, which means that you have to support the plant on a trellis. Instead, these determinant plants just grow into a little bush, stop and fruit.
23:28 Speaker 11 And what the idea is, is that each shoot that goes off flowers, produces a tomato, and then it stops growing. So you, they all grow out from the center stalk to more or less the same length.
23:39 Cynthia Graber? And finally, Jack needed a machine harvestable tomato to be hard enough that the mechanical harvester wouldn't smush it. So he'd breed tomatoes he thought might be harder than usual and he'd drop them.
23:49 Speaker 11 Like he'd take them out in the field and drop them and he would say, well, a good one would, you could drop twice before it broke. You know, a really good one, you could drop three times.
23:59 Nicola Twilley? Meanwhile, to tackle the machine part of the mechanical harvesting problem, he worked with an engineer at Davis called Kobe Lawrenson. Kobe started out with a modified potato digger, which managed to harvest a very respectable 80% of the tomatoes in a field, but left them in a single soggy, muddy mass.
24:17 Cynthia Graber? Over the next decade, Kobe and Jack and their colleagues developed all sorts of improvements. They went through 30 to 40 different versions of the harvester. Finally, in 1959, a farmer agreed they could try out the latest version in his fields.
24:29 Speaker 11 And they said, don't invite anybody because this is just a prototype. And when they got there, the whole field was just full of all these academics and farmers and industry people. And of course, it made a huge mess. It made one big pile of like tomato goop with mud in it. And the machine would break down and the whole thing was just, you know, a mess.
24:50 Nicola Twilley? But Jack and Kobe were determined to succeed and they kept tweaking the machine. And they eventually got it to a point where only about a quarter of the tomatoes turned into goop during the harvest, which was closer to being considered an acceptable loss, at least by some tomato growers.
25:07 Cynthia Graber? Including someone named Tilly Lewis. She was a pioneering businesswoman in the early to mid 1900s. She started off in the tomato business because she married a guy who was a wholesale grocery distributor. And he did a lot of work with imported food from Italy, like canned tomatoes.
25:21 Nicola Twilley? She thought the San Marzano tomatoes that the Italians were growing and canning tasted way better than what American farmers were growing. And then, when those tariffs we talked about came along in the 1930s, she saw an opportunity. Why not grow the good Italian tomatoes in California?
25:38 Speaker 11 And her husband was like, no.
25:39 Cynthia Graber? Experts at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden also told her this wouldn't work, but she didn't care. Tilly headed off to Italy. She met her husband's connections in the canning business. She actually worked in a canary for a while. And then she divorced the guy and moved to Stockton in the Central Valley.
25:53 Speaker 11 And then she partnered up with an Italian-American guy and they started growing San Marzano tomatoes in California.
26:01 Nicola Twilley? His name was Florindo Del Gaiso. His family ran one of the biggest tomato canneries in Naples, and he was apparently tall, dark, and handsome. There were rumors, but all we can say for sure is that Tilly and Florindo never married. Their names were combined only on a tomato can. Their new company was called Flo-Till, from Florindo and Tilly.
26:24 Cynthia Graber? In any case, Florindo soon died, and Tilly was left in charge of the company. And one of the reasons that her tomato canning company could more easily adopt the new harvesters was that she was already growing longer, thinner tomatoes, and these were better suited to the machines. Most everyone else was growing big, round tomatoes, and they couldn't be bothered switching not only to a machine, but to new tomatoes, too.
26:45 Speaker 11 And she invested and bought some of these machines. So she was very important for getting this off the ground.
26:51 Cynthia Graber? Tilly lived a fascinating life. She even invented some of the earliest diet foods. But for the rest of our story, you should go listen to our episode called Sweet and Low Calorie about artificial sweeteners. She was a force of nature.
27:04 Nicola Twilley? Gradually, other tomato canners followed Tilly's pioneering lead and got on board, especially once labor became a real issue after the end of the Bracero program in 1964. That year, only a quarter of California's tomatoes were harvested by machine, but just two years later, it was 80%. By 1968, the hand harvest was over. Canned tomatoes were basically all harvested by machine.
27:30 Speaker 10 Modern industry in the field. The machine picker is a triumph of recent agricultural engineering.
27:36 Cynthia Graber? The machines work by digging into the dirt and scooping up the tomato plant. This is great if the fields are dry. And most of the tomato fields in California were irrigated, not rain-fed, so that irrigation could be turned off.
27:46 Speaker 11 The disadvantages in the east are that it rains all the time.
27:51 Nicola Twilley? Before the mechanical harvester, there were plenty of tomato canning factories in Indiana and Maryland and New Jersey. After, nine out of every 10 tomatoes grown for canning were grown in California.
28:03 Cynthia Graber? But that wasn't the only impact. The machines were so expensive that only large farms could afford them. Within five years of the machines' large-scale adoption, thousands of tomato growers went out of business. Only a few hundred remained, and tens of thousands of jobs were lost.
28:16 Nicola Twilley? Stanislav's is one of just a few big canning businesses in the Central Valley today, and they do the harvesting for their growers. We went out into the field to see the latest and greatest version of the mechanical harvester.
28:29 Speaker 00 As you can see here, this is a tomato harvester. We have about seven or eight that San Sals owns.
28:35 Nicola Twilley? We stood next to it. It is really, really big, like as big as a school bus. It has all sorts of different kinds of machinery sticking out on either side, and what looks like a massive conveyor belt slash escalator going up the entire front, next to the driver who's sitting in a covered cab.
28:50 Speaker 00 I've tried driving one of these things once. Very terrifying. It is all, it's a big machine.
28:55 Nicola Twilley? You're not gonna let us drive it?
28:56 Speaker 00 You could get on it. I don't know if I'm gonna let you drive it.
29:00 Nicola Twilley? Juan is a wise man, but he did let us climb aboard and admire the machine from there. At the bottom of that massive conveyor belt, there's a kind of combo digger slicer.
29:09 Speaker 00 And really what it's doing is skimming about like the first inch or two of the top swol, and it's pinching that plant off. And when that plant gets pinched off, it goes on to this belt right here, hugged by this belt on top. And it's basically, to me, it always looks like a carpet of tomato plant going up.
29:25 Nicola Twilley? The whole plants roll up the conveyor belt, and a lot of the dirt falls off them. As the plants are being jostled and shaken around, this helps dislodge the tomatoes from the vine, and they roll onto a different belt.
29:35 Speaker 00 And that's where you get like the first introduction of technology that's changed quite a bit. And this is like laser eye sorters. And these can be set up to see certain color, and certain color actually activates the fingers that are down here. You can hear that sound.
29:51 Speaker 00 When you hear that, really what it is, is it's seeing red, and it's set up to see red. So as soon as it does, it's able to ignite those fingers with a little air pressure, and it'll kick the red tomatoes back in.
30:03 Nicola Twilley? Anything that's not red, like all the green parts of the plant, dirt and green tomatoes, that gets shaken down into a shredder, and then a vacuum hose sucks up any loose debris.
30:13 Speaker 00 And it'll shoot that into the shredder as well, and then out the back. Never want to stand behind a tomato machine while it's moving.
30:19 Nicola Twilley? Juan has learned this the hard way.
30:20 Speaker 00 Oh, it's a game for some of these guys sometimes. Whenever I'm driving by them or something like that, they're just like, oh, let me turn it on. And you get painted green.
30:26 Nicola Twilley? The tomatoes pass along the length of this machine, and along the way, there are a couple more sorters, all kicking out anything that isn't a perfect red tomato. All these lasers and scanners, they weren't on Jack Hanna and Koby Lawrence's original machine.
30:40 Speaker 00 Before, there would be about 14 people on the machine. And what they were doing is they'd be going even slower, but they were hand sorting everything. So that way, you're still getting only red into the tub, but it was all manual labor.
30:53 Nicola Twilley? Still less labor than harvesting by hand, but a lot more than today.
30:57 Cynthia Graber? Juan explained how this all works while the harvester was idle, because once it gets going, it's really loud. We were standing next to the sorter when he told the driver to start up the engine and get digging.
31:09 Nicola Twilley? And just like that, the machine rumbled off, sucking up all the plants in its path, and all the ripe red tomatoes came rolling down the belts beside us. We have video on our socials. It's quite astonishing, honestly.
31:24 Speaker 17 Even watching it with the naked eye, you barely see it going on. But when you watch it in slow motion and you see the little lasers kicking everything off, and anything that's not a red ripe tomato is booted out right in the field.
31:35 Nicola Twilley? I could have honestly stood there all day, watching this huge machine lumber up and down the rows of tomatoes, sucking up entire plants, pooping out dirt and leaves, and raining down beautiful, perfect ruby red tomatoes into huge bins on a truck that follows along. It was mesmerizing.
31:54 Cynthia Graber? The machine itself is, as Nikki said, astonishing. And then I was also shocked to learn that during the season, which is only a little more than two months, these machines are running all the time.
32:05 Speaker 00 The machine runs 24 hours, seven days a week, just like the canary does. It's intense. The only break these machines really get is kind of clinging up before shift change.
32:15 Nicola Twilley? All of this sounds extremely industrial and as though efficiency has triumphed yet again over taste. That's the story of fresh tomatoes, for sure. But it's not the story of canned ones. Why canned tomatoes are actually the greatest and tastiest pantry staple, and how to make sure you're getting the most delicious ones after the break.
32:38 Speaker 16 Hey, Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.
33:05 Speaker 18 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
33:33 Speaker 19 Born from the intensity of a night in the Eternal City. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine-leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at macys.com.
34:02 Cynthia Graber? We told you that Jack Hanna and other people at the time, and since then, who've been breeding the perfect tomatoes for canning, had some very specific tomato features in mind, and none of them were about flavor. But that's not the whole picture. Tom Cortopassi, he's the president of Stanislaz, he told us what his breeders focus on.
34:18 Speaker 20 Well, first off, you know, it has to be able to handle that harvester, right? So it has to have enough firmness. They also, you notice, they kind of all ripen at once.
34:28 Cynthia Graber? So far, so similar to Jack Hanna. But that's not all canned tomato breeders are looking for.
34:34 Speaker 20 From a tomato standpoint, you know, the varieties that we choose have a lot of flavor. A nice balance of sugar and acid. That's what gives you that, you know, when you bite in a tomato, you get both. It's like any good food, it's balanced.
34:49 Cynthia Graber? Of course, Tom would say his company's tomatoes are flavorful, but there's only one way to verify that.
34:54 Speaker 11 You guys want to take a bite?
34:55 Cynthia Graber? Yeah. Yes, of course. Okay, the first thing to point out here is that all canning tomatoes are harvested ripe, so they're at their full flavor potential. That helps. And Juan had brought a little salt for us. That also helps. I know that you brought salt for us. Perfect.
35:13 Speaker 11 Here's one piece.
35:14 Cynthia Graber? Thank you.
35:16 Nicola Twilley? Mmm.
35:17 Cynthia Graber? Mmm.
35:20 Cynthia Graber? That was really good. Yum.
35:22 Nicola Twilley? It still had that heat from the field. It was ripe. It was juicy. It was good tomato. It was a little firmer than the ones I grow or pick up at the farmer's market.
35:32 Cynthia Graber? That's because, as we said, they're bred to be able to make it through the mechanical harvesting without getting smushed. So I wouldn't necessarily choose it for my salads.
35:40 Nicola Twilley? But it still tasted like a tomato. Much more tomatoey than the fresh eating tomatoes you buy at the store out of season.
35:48 Cynthia Graber? In a way, canned tomatoes got lucky. We mentioned in the fresh tomato episode this summer that Flavor accidentally got bred out of Florida tomatoes as they were being bred to be hard and chippable and something that could be picked green and ripened later.
36:01 Nicola Twilley? That never happened to the varieties of tomatoes that are grown for canning. They were intensively bred to be machine harvestable, but the Flavor jeans came along for the ride. And honestly, we are all grateful for that stroke of luck.
36:14 Cynthia Graber? Stanislav's is a canning company that only sells to other companies. You can't buy their products at the grocery store. And Jeff told us the main way they try to distinguish themselves is taste.
36:23 Speaker 12 Our customers are restaurateurs. We're trying to help the mom and pop, onesie-twosie restaurant owner to have superior flavor over chain operations that can have price advantage. So we want to give them flavor advantage. And that's why Flavor is so important to us.
36:42 Nicola Twilley? Lots of things go into Flavor, including the tomato variety and how it's grown. But Stanislav's' big edge is to do with how they process the tomatoes. You, like me, have probably eaten canned tomatoes and tomato sauces your whole life without ever realizing there's a big divide in the world of canned tomato products. And it's to do with how they're processed.
37:05 Speaker 20 Three out of every four tomatoes that get harvested in California make it to industrial paste, you know, which is kind of tomato sludge. And they take that paste and they make other sauces, barbecue sauce, soups, things like that.
37:20 Speaker 00 We do no paste, zero. So it's all just fresh pack tomatoes here.
37:26 Nicola Twilley? There's industrial paste and there's fresh pack. And from the way Tom and Juan talked about it, it's pretty much a case of never the twain shall meet.
37:34 Cynthia Graber? So assuming you're like us and these terms are new to you, let's start with paste processing. Jeff told us the first part is the same, the harvest.
37:40 Speaker 12 And then you're going to bring the product into the plant and you're going to cut it up and juice it. And you're going to take that juice and you're going to evaporate it until you just have a very, very thick, thick paste, thicker than you would buy in the store. And they're going to put that paste in a big tote and they're going to set it aside.
37:58 Nicola Twilley? In the 1970s, a scientist at Purdue whose family worked in the tomato canning business invented this aseptic storage system. He figured out that if you coated steel tanks with epoxy resin and sterilized all your equipment and filled any air gaps with nitrogen gas, you could store tomato paste at room temperature for months and months. He won the World Food Prize for this breakthrough and ended up revolutionizing the juice industry as well as the canned tomato business.
38:26 Cynthia Graber? Jeff told us that today, companies will put their tomato paste in 300-gallon aseptic bags that are stored in plastic bulk storage boxes.
38:34 Speaker 12 Then what they will do is when the season is over, they will bring that product back into the plant and they will heat it again and then they will add water to it and they will make a sauce.
38:45 Cynthia Graber? Like pizza sauce, pasta sauce, or ketchup, soup, barbecue sauce, whatever tomato product a company wants to make.
38:51 Speaker 21 Heinz use tomatoes for tomato soup, tomato ketchup, the famous sauce for baked beans, and also for spaghetti.
38:58 Speaker 12 Like I said, 75% of the tomatoes are done that way.
39:03 Speaker 21 The main bulk of the tomatoes is converted into tomato puree. Lovely stuff.
39:08 Nicola Twilley? This is the split in the canning industry. The other side, besides Stanislas is on, they do something called fresh pack. They don't make paste and store it and reconstitute it later in the year. They just put the tomatoes in the can after harvest.
39:23 Cynthia Graber? A fresh pack plant has to be big enough to process all the tomatoes they want to package in that short window of time those tomatoes are ripe. And then that whole huge factory sits idle the entire rest of the year. That's why these kinds of tomatoes are more expensive.
39:36 Nicola Twilley? But this process also has an impact on flavor.
39:39 Speaker 12 And so it has one cook versus most industry is doing two cooks.
39:45 Cynthia Graber? That one cook, that's because all canned tomatoes have to be cooked for a certain amount of time to kill off any pathogens and sterilize them. That way they'll stay safe in the can for a really long time. Paste makers cook their tomatoes twice, as Jeff said, and they cook them for a long time. That really changes the flavor of the tomatoes. But the folks at Stanislav's do it differently.
40:04 Speaker 12 A very important formula for us is that time and temperature are the enemy of fresh tomato flavor. So we're always trying to manage that to reduce the time, reduce the temperature.
40:14 Nicola Twilley? What that means is that the tomatoes go from that monster machine in the field to the plant in no more than a couple of hours. And then they try to get them out of the plant in a can in the next four hours. So six hours total from growing in the field to sitting in a can. We followed them over to the plant to see what happened next.
40:34 Speaker 12 So we're entering the plant.
40:35 Cynthia Graber? Oh, it smells amazing. Now I'm getting hungry. Smell the tomato. There were conveyor belts of tomatoes all around us.
40:44 Speaker 12 So it's just two rivers of red going down to this escalator at the end. They're climbing up into our plant.
40:51 Cynthia Graber? I absolutely love the roller coaster going up. They're going down, they're going across, they're going around. Luckily, not quite as fast as most roller coasters are.
41:02 Nicola Twilley? The tomatoes get thoroughly washed, of course, and there are various scanners and humans doing quality control at all points. But the first stop for most of the tomatoes is this incredibly clever machine that uses steam and rubber fingers to get the skin off.
41:17 Cynthia Graber? So we can see the tiny, like, little bits of tomato skin coming off there. It smells like cooked tomato now. And...
41:25 Nicola Twilley? It's so clever. They're like just gently being rubbed by this, like, these rubbery fingers.
41:32 Cynthia Graber? And then we watched the tomatoes come out the other end. After all, the skin had been removed.
41:35 Speaker 15 Oh, my gosh.
41:37 Nicola Twilley? There they are, the naked, skinless tomatoes. They look like naked, skinless tomatoes.
41:43 Speaker 15 But like beautifully perfect naked, skinless tomatoes. Like surprisingly perfect.
41:49 Cynthia Graber? Stanislav's makes a bunch of different canned tomato products. They package those beautiful tomatoes whole in a bunch of tomato juice and sauce made from less than perfect looking tomatoes. They sell cans of crushed tomatoes. They even make their own sauces, but definitely not reconstituted from paste.
42:04 Nicola Twilley? At this point in our tomato journey, it felt like time to eat again. We tried the tomato in the field. It was delicious. But how about once it was in the can? Could we really taste that fresh pack difference?
42:17 Cynthia Graber? Stanislav's has a company kitchen on site and a chef who works there. And the chef had prepared a number of different dishes for us. One of them was a plate that had just one perfect canned tomato with some mozzarella, basil, and olive oil. I'd never seen a mini caprese salad made of canned tomatoes before.
42:32 Nicola Twilley? I had not either, and frankly, I admired the chutzpah. I mean, this is a dish supposed to showcase the most perfect summer tomatoes. All right, I'm going to, I mean, I'm going to start with tomato because that's the main event here.
42:47 Nicola Twilley? It's got a little bit of olive oil and a little bit of basil.
42:52 Nicola Twilley? That is unnaturally delicious. It is so, so pure tomato.
42:58 Cynthia Graber? I'm also really impressed with the texture of it, just even cutting into it. It has a little give, but you can cut it really easily. It's like a really lovely textured tomato.
43:07 Nicola Twilley? And it doesn't have any of that solid core that you can get. It's a, just all tomato, all the way through, pure red. The color is intense.
43:18 Cynthia Graber? It's very beautiful. Here we go. Mmm.
43:22 Cynthia Graber? That is a delicious tomato.
43:24 Nicola Twilley? This was actually kind of mind blowing. A canned tomato, served where you would normally have a fresh one, and it was just as, if not more delicious.
43:33 Cynthia Graber? They served us their sauces in a few different dishes, too, and those were also super delicious. Now, here's where we have to disappoint you listeners, though, because we did tell you, but here's a reminder. Stanislav's only sells to restaurants and food companies. Their cans are a full gallon each can, more than six pounds of tomatoes in there, whereas a large can in the store is about just under two pounds. Sorry.
43:54 Nicola Twilley? I am considering doing some kind of deal with my neighborhood pizza restaurant. That said, honestly, the canned tomatoes in the store are all pretty good.
44:03 Cynthia Graber? But for people who are looking to get the very most delicious canned tomatoes, the advice you always hear is buy San Marzano tomatoes. They're the best. The San Marzano is kind of, um, it's pretty mythical. The story behind the San Marzano goes like this. As we discussed in our tomato episode this summer, tomatoes in general took a while to catch on in Italy, but when they did, they were huge hits.
44:24 Nicola Twilley? But as Italians started canning whole tomatoes to supply the British market, they started planting a new variety. It was a cross between two traditional varieties that had been developed up north near Parma. This new variety was the legendary San Marzano of tradition, which means it's really only a century old.
44:43 Cynthia Graber? A tomato canner who lived up north brought the seeds of this hybrid to southern Italy for a few reasons. The volcanic soils near Vesuvius were incredibly rich. It's sunny, it's a great spot for tomatoes, they do really well there. And some farmers were willing to give these new tomatoes a try.
44:58 Nicola Twilley? Within a couple of years, the San Marzano was the tomato. Everyone in the region was growing it, it was being exported. People like Tilly Lewis were falling in love with it. It was the bedrock of Italy's tomato canning industry. They saw it as red gold.
45:13 Cynthia Graber? For a few decades, things were going swimmingly, and then disaster struck. Arthur told us the story.
45:18 Speaker 11 What happened in Italy was that in the 60s and 70s, the San Marzano just became subject to all of these molds and wilts and critters, and it was going to go extinct.
45:32 Nicola Twilley? Time for a new tomato to come to the rescue, the authentically Italian sounding Roma.
45:38 Speaker 11 The Roma was, I mean, it was actually developed in the US. And so, yeah, I mean, it sounds like it. What could be more Italian?
45:46 Cynthia Graber? Seriously. But no, it was developed at a USDA facility in Maryland. The Roma does have some San Marzano among its many tomato parents, but other tomatoes were involved too, and it was bred to be resistant to all those molds and wilts.
45:58 Nicola Twilley? So Italian growers mostly switched to that. Today, Stanislav's and most other canners have moved on to even newer hybrids, though even those have both Romas and San Marzanos in their ancestry.
46:09 Cynthia Graber? In the 1990s, the Slow Food Movement, it was founded in Italy just a few years before. They wanted to bring the original San Marzanos back. But when they went looking for San Marzanos being grown near Naples, they found 20 different kinds of tomatoes, all being called San Marzano.
46:24 Nicola Twilley? What had happened since the days of Brits enjoying San Marzanos with their fried breakfasts and Tilly importing them to the US, what had happened is that Italian tomato growers had let their tomato plants have lots of indiscriminate sex.
46:40 Cynthia Graber? Nobody was monitoring the purity of the San Marzano line. Some San Marzanos survived the bugs and wilts and likely either accidentally or on purpose were crossbred with other local tomatoes. And so people were growing those and calling them all San Marzanos, which was a problem for the Slow Food people.
46:57 Nicola Twilley? Slow Food ended up just choosing two of the many so-called San Marzanos being grown and calling those the official San Marzano tomato. And the growers in the region also got something called a Protected Designation of Origin, a PDO or DOP, depending on which language you're speaking. That means that all canned tomatoes labeled San Marzano DOP have to be one of those two varietals grown in this one specific region near Naples.
47:26 Cynthia Graber? But even if you buy a can of tomatoes labeled San Marzano DOP, they might not actually be one of those two varieties or grown in that region. For one, there's only a tiny, tiny amount of land dedicated to San Marzanos, and so there's way more demand than supply. That creates an incentive for fraud.
47:42 Speaker 20 There's not that many. There are some that come from that region in Italy.
47:49 Speaker 20 We don't think many come to this country because why would they? They're going to keep them in Italy.
47:53 Nicola Twilley? The other issue is that if you're buying San Marzano GOP tomatoes in the US, well, it's not actually fraud to label them GOP even if they're not grown in the region because the US does not honor European GOP regulations.
48:07 Cynthia Graber? So it's certainly possible that those San Marzanos you buy at the store might not be San Marzanos according to the letter of the GOP. It's really impossible to know, but they still might be delicious.
48:16 Nicola Twilley? So if looking for the label San Marzano isn't going to guarantee peak deliciousness, what should you look for? What's a winter tomato lover to do?
48:25 Cynthia Graber? First off, you want to buy whole canned tomatoes if possible. That way, your tomatoes definitely won't be reconstituted from paste.
48:32 Speaker 20 If you see a can and you open it up and they're whole? Yeah, there's no other way of doing it. You can't preserve the tomato and then repack it whole. So that's the one item, when it's the actual whole tomato, you know.
48:48 Cynthia Graber? But crushed and diced can be even more convenient to use than whole ones in a can. How about those?
48:53 Speaker 12 As you cut up those tomatoes and you create different products, you're getting further and further away from the garden. Diced tomatoes is obviously going to be a tomato that doesn't need to have the visual aspect that a whole peeled tomato. Because you can just cut it up and you don't know that it didn't look great. You're also going to use a fair amount of calcium chloride to firm that tomato up because the tomato, when it's cut in those little squares, is not going to retain that shape on its own.
49:24 Nicola Twilley? Calcium chloride is a kind of salt. It's a common food additive. You'll often find it in cans of beans, too.
49:30 Speaker 12 So they put that calcium chloride in there and that'll firm it up and give that identity. Some people can taste that and it's kind of a chalky taste if you can pick it up. That would not have the same quality and sweetness that you would get with a whole peeled tomato.
49:45 Cynthia Graber? Crushed and ground tomatoes don't have calcium chloride added. They don't need it.
49:48 Nicola Twilley? But they could be reconstituted from paste.
49:51 Cynthia Graber? Some are. For sauces, you have to look at the ingredient list.
49:53 Speaker 20 If you go to the grocery store and you look at a sauce and it says like tomato puree and then parentheses, paste and water.
50:02 Speaker 20 Then that means it was remanufactured. Most of everything on the grocery store shelf is that way. Not everything.
50:08 Cynthia Graber? I didn't know to look for this before we reported this episode, but I was happy to see that my favorite sauce, basically the only one we buy, it's clear that it's not reconstituted. That might be why I like it so much.
50:18 Nicola Twilley? But honestly, even the cheapest, most basic, reconstituted from paste canned tomato product is still a good thing. And that's because, like we said, canning tomatoes never had the flavor bred out of them and they're allowed to ripen before they're harvested. And that is why we love them.
50:36 Speaker 11 I think a can of tomatoes is one of the most underrated cheap products you can buy.
50:43 Nicola Twilley? I'm into that.
50:44 Cynthia Graber? Honestly, if there's one tip we could give you for winter cooking, it's to always keep canned tomatoes around. We are not being paid by Big Tomato. We do genuinely believe that they're the greatest.
50:58 Nicola Twilley? Thanks this episode to the folks at Stanislaw's Food Products, Juan Rios, Tom Cortepassi, Jeff Lundquist, and Peaches Brady. You can find their product at all the best pizza restaurants. And thanks to Alec Watson for connecting us to them.
51:11 Cynthia Graber? Thanks also to Arthur Allen and Bill Alexander. We have links to their books on our website, gastropod.com. Thanks also to our fantastic producer, Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. Till then.
51:24 Speaker 04 I'm Josh Mucio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't.
51:35 Speaker 13 I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about like middleware AI wrappers.
51:40 Speaker 04 Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands. We're building Eight Sleep for daytime. Hardware that helps blind people see. They kept asking for middle finger. Next thing we knew, we had like 10 students running around flipping each other off. We've got deep tech to change the weather.
51:58 Speaker 05 Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.
52:01 Speaker 14 What if you wanted to not make it rain somewhere else? Like one day, we're just like, screw Arizona.
52:09 Speaker 04 And dairy?
52:10 Speaker 06 I never imagined my life journey would be milk.
52:12 Speaker 04 Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.
52:22 Speaker 18 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalised products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
Previous Is Your Cinnamon Fake? Where Does Kefir Come From? Plus: Why Is Citric Acid In Everything? Ask Gastropod! Next Ripe for Global Domination: The Story of the Avocado Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated