Andrew Jack
Broccoli will be marketed as Britain?s latest superfood, after a new hybrid variety richer in chemicals linked to a reduced risk of cancer and cardiovascular problems goes on sale.
Marks and Spencer, the high street retailer, will be the first supermarket in the UK to offer Benefort?, a natural cross-breed of British broccoli with a wild growing Sicilian variety.
The product has intellectual property rights now controlled by the agricultural company Monsanto, but was developed by British academics and involves no genetic modification.
Benefort? contains two or three times the existing levels of the plant nutrient glucoraphanin, which some clinical trials have shown to be not only safe but useful in large quantities in reducing the risk of aggressive prostate cancer and heart disease.
Professor Richard Mithen, who led the work at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich which began in the early 1990s, stressed that legislation limited the health claims that could be made on food within Europe, but that data to back up the vegetable?s benefits would soon be filed with regulators. ?We have got very good data.?
The broccoli was bred by combining a wild growing Sicilian variety that is bitter and has no head but contains valuable additional nutrients with the more edible English variety.
Under a technology transfer arrangement that will help provide future income to fund British science, the rights were granted to Siminis, a seed company since sold to Monsanto.
M&S will sell spears of the new broccoli at ?1.49 each, compared with ?1 for existing varieties, as part of its growing ?Simply More? range, which includes Vitamin D enhanced mushrooms, sprouts with additional Vitamin C and spinach, potatoes and tomatoes enriched with selenium.
The retailer?which receives the broccoli from farmers in the UK and Italy and Spain during colder months?will initially have an exclusive deal in the UK, although there are plans to license the broccoli to other retailers elsewhere in the European Union.
US President George Bush Sr was renowned for his dislike of broccoli, but Benefort? has already gone on sale over the summer on the health conscious US west coast in a number of retail outlets.
David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said: ?This excellent work has led to the development of a highly commercial food product that will be both grown and sold in the UK, giving a real boost to agriculture, our personal health and the economy.?
?The Financial Times Limited 2011
