If you’re selling tomatoes to your customers or using them to prepare dishes for them, the first thing to do is decide which tomatoes to order. Two varieties that may pique your interest are hybrid and heirloom tomatoes. Both of these varieties have different strengths and weaknesses, and determining which you should get depends on your needs. Today, we’re going to compare heirloom tomatoes with their hybrid counterparts.
Heirloom Tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes are the types of tomatoes that get grown without any cross-pollination. These tomatoes are open-pollinated, which means pollination is done by insects and the wind instead of having humans interfere. Because of this, they can have steady characteristics from one year to another.
Heirloom tomatoes offer great taste to consumers. This is in part because they are able to ripen on the vine instead of being harvested early and then preserved. If you’re selling tomatoes to customers, they may be interested by the unique shapes that every tomato offers. With heirloom varieties, every tomato is one of a kind.
The only downside heirloom tomatoes have for your business is that some people may not appreciate the unique shape of each tomato, viewing them as misshapen and inconsistent. This view will vary from person to person, but there are many people who appreciate the uniqueness of every tomato.
Hybrid Tomatoes
Hybrid tomatoes are a type of crop that will have a unique look and timing to it. Hybrid tomatoes are often offered at supermarkets because they can be crossbred to reach a certain combination that is suitable for the distributor. Cross-breeding allows vendors to decide how resistant the tomatoes are to disease, how large they are, and their maturity level, among other things. This lets supermarkets determine the exact type of tomato they want to sell to their customers.
Hybrid tomatoes are often produced in larger quantities than heirloom tomatoes, so you’ll be able to keep your store stocked on whatever tomatoes you need. They will also last longer after they’re harvested, so you’ll have more time to sell your tomatoes once they get placed on the shelves for distribution.
The main downside to hybrid tomatoes is that they don’t tend to have the same quality of flavor as heirloom tomatoes.
Baywater Farms Has The Right Produce For You
Baywater Farms is a family-owned and operated farm servicing Baltimore, Washington D.C., Maryland, Delaware beaches, and the Eastern Shore. We are capable of meeting the demands of your produce distributor, restaurant produce supplier, CSA produce supplier, or wholesale produce supplier while maintaining the integrity and character of a small farm. When you work with Baywater Farms, you work with an experienced, ethical, and local farm dedicated to providing the highest-quality heirloom produce.