GoKawiilIf you wanted to create better blackberries, you could try to breed a variety without the seeds that get stuck in your teeth. Or one without the thorns that make the berries hard to pick. Or you could aim for more environmentally efficient plants that produce more berries per acre with less water and fewer chemicals.
With decades of work and a fair amount of luck, you might achieve one of those goals.
But a North Carolina startup called Pairwise is using the gene-editing technology called Crispr to try to achieve all those goals at once, crafting seedless, thornless, higher-yielding blackberry plants—and in a matter of years rather than decades.
That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding.
Pairwise’s triple-threat berries won’t be in US groceries before 2030—even turbo-charged breeding takes time—but they could help jump-start a new agricultural revolution, a high-tech era of designer crops optimized to benefit consumers, farmers, and the Earth. The company is also working on peaches without pits, row crops resistant to a variety of diseases, fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest within a year or two rather than three to eight, and a slew of other novel products, often in partnership with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses.
So far, the market for gene-edited food is almost entirely theoretical. Pairwise launched the first Crispr product in the US in 2023, a less bitter mustard green. It said it was discontinuing the product in early 2024 in favor of developing other gene-edited crops. Today, the company has received more than 50 regulatory approvals for five edited crops in nine countries, but it has only one creation for sale, a high-yielding blackberry variety available in limited quantities in Colombia.
Unlike genetically modified organisms—crops tweaked with DNA from different species—Crispr seeds haven’t yet faced major roadblocks from regulators or intense hostility from the public. That doesn’t mean backlash won’t come, though.
Crispr was only invented in 2012, and there’s still danger that it could get swept up in the political and cultural backlash against “Frankenfoods” that has limited the impact of GMOs. The rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement is just one symptom of the growing discomfort consumers have with the notion of edible technology. Given the lingering unpopularity of GMOs, despite decades of scientific evidence that they don’t harm human health or the environment, even industry analysts who consider Crispr safer and more useful are reluctant to predict the success of the next revolution.