How farmers and scientists are engineering your meal

"Flavour is a re-emerging trend, certainly," says Franco Fubini, founder of fruit and vegetable supplier Natoora.

You may be surprised that flavour ever went of fashion.

But finding truly tasty fruit and vegetable varieties can be difficult, largely as a result of requirements of supermarkets, he says.

"They started demanding that varieties have a longer shelf life, so for instance in the case of a tomato, it includes a thicker skin, so the skins don't split more easily; a tomato that perhaps ripens faster, that can absorb more water.

"So over time you breed your varieties for attributes apart from flavour. The flavour attribute starts falling in importance, and as nature has it, if you breed for other traits you breed out flavour."

Mr Fubini's company specialises in seasonal produce selected for flavour, and sells its produce to restaurants and high-end shops all over the world.

"A few of this rebirth originates from restaurants because chefs have quite a lot of influence," he says. "That and travel have both spurred upon this rebirth of flavour, this seek out flavour."

Breeders and researchers are leading this search, using superior techniques to produce fruit and vegetables that have all the flavour of traditional varieties - while still keeping the supermarkets happy.

Prof Harry Klee of Florida University's horticultural sciences department is working to understand the chemical and genetic make-up of fruit and vegetable flavours - concentrating on the tomato.

"The tomato is a long-term model system for fruit development. It includes a short generation time, great genetic resources and [is] the most economically important fruit crop worldwide.

"It was only the next plant species to have a complete genome sequence - an enormous assist in studying the genetics of an organism."

Plant flavour is a complex phenomenon. Regarding a tomato, it stems from the interaction of sugars, acids and over twelve volatile compounds produced from amino acids, essential fatty acids and carotenoids.

Prof Klee wants to identify the genes controlling the synthesis of the flavour volatiles, and using this to produce a better-tasting tomato.

"It isn't quite at the main point where we've completed assembling the superior flavour traits right into a single line, but we be prepared to be there in another 12 months," he says.

You'll be able to use genetic modification (GM) to boost flavour by importing genes from other species, however in a lot of the world produce created in this manner is banned.

However, other varieties of genetic manipulation are more widely accepted. US firm Pairwise is focusing on new fruit and vegetable varieties through the use of CRISPR - gene editing technology qualified from Harvard, the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Rather than taking genes from other species, like GM, CRISPR involves tweaking existing genes within the plant by cutting and splicing.

"We're making really small changes in a single or two bits of DNA," says Pairwise co-founder Haven Baker.

Such gene editing is considered "non-GM" in most of North America, South America and Japan. Yet, in Europe, where genetic modification is highly contentious, it really is considered GM and is kept under strict regulation.

Having left the EU, the UK has launched an appointment on using gene editing to modify livestock and food crops in England.

Even in the US, where views are less entrenched, some growers are cautious with genetic modification.

"We aren't fans of it at all. While sometimes innovation done right maybe works well, we have confidence in tradition and not necessarily messing with things - and going back to nature and the way nature functions," says Mr Fubini.

But some innovation will be extremely difficult without intervention at the genetic level.

Pairwise's first product, expected in a year or two, is a seedless blackberry it says will have a more regular taste than traditional varieties. Additionally it is focusing on a stoneless cherry.

All this could possibly be done through traditional breeding techniques, but as fruit trees take years to mature it could be a very long-term project.

"A number of the fruits we're thinking about, like cherries where we want a pitless cherry, theoretically you could do it with breeding nonetheless it would take 100-150 years," says Mr Baker.

"The products you want to make and we think consumers want aren't achievable inside our lifetimes with conventional breeding, it's just too slow."