NL: Prominent to start with snack tomatoes in 2018

Dutch tomato specialist, Prominent will enter the snack tomato sector next year. "It has become a substantial retail sector, and clients often ask us for this product", says Prominent's Gert-Jan van der Meer. "Prominent already supplies a wide variety of tomatoes, and this is an opportunity to further expand that assortment, to 15 segments."

"We will start with a small number of hectares, where we will do unlit cultivation. The idea is, of course, to enlarge this in the coming years, depending on market demand", says Gert-Jan. Prominent expects to make the snack tomatoes available primarily to their existing clients who want to broaden their purchase range from Prominent.

In a column, Jack Groenewegen writes that the snack tomatoes offer a chance in the taste segment. "At Prominent, we already have all the flavours, but in the large size segment, taste is not what sells. We have regularly tried better tasting varieties, but less of these are produced. We don't get good prices for these before they disappear again", he writes. "It seems that taste is not what matters for every type of tomato. In the smaller size segment, it however does count. There is growth in the cocktail and sunstream segments, and our tomatoes in these two segments are in the shelves all year long."

An extra tasty tomato forms part of the snack tomato segment. Just as in the other tomato varieties, Prominent works with breed segmentation, and so they chose the Sweetelle (Syngenta).