Europe’s first serious plant “breeders” were the Cistercian monks, who kept the remnants of Roman agriculture alive throughout the Middle Ages. But the monks were limited to selecting from accidental crosses produced by nature. As a result, conservation and chance improvement of prized, ancient fruits were really more acts of faith and deliberation. Renaissance trade and curiosity began to open the palate, but the scientific origins of fruit breeding and selection awaited the turn of the 19th century, when Thomas Andrew Knight of London’s Royal Horticultural Society began systematic breeding programs aimed at producing superior fruits and vegetables.

But to do so, the scientists working there will have to overcome near fanatical resistance to genetic engineering and national as well as European Union laws that ban most genetic engineering of fresh fruits and vegetables—not to mention brigades of anti-GM activists in Germany, France, and England who readily destroy open research fields. The stakes are enormous because they concern the world’s major fresh foods: tomatoes (the world’s largest fresh commodity), apples (the world’s most ubiquitous fruit), lettuce, peppers, and potatoes—all of which are facing pesticide bans and greater disease threats than ever in history. If they succeed, the plant engineers could end up saving the global agriculture industry tens of billions in annual losses that result from spoilage and crop failures. What’s more, they stand to reduce greenhouse gas emissions created from pesticide and fertilizer manufacture.

Confronted, however, with the reality of anti-GM sentiment in Europe, scientists at two “Food Valley” companies, Genetwister and Keygene, have developed different but equally innovative strategies. Genetwister focuses on genetic analysis of the “keeping qualities” (the length of survival in transit and on the shelf) of fruits and vegetables for some of the world’s largest produce brokers. Because this technique tracks how certain genes are expressed, it is called “expression profiling.”

Keygene uses finely tuned gene sequencing to identify the most promising “parents” for conventional breeding, and then to eliminate all but the best progeny well before those progeny push out their first blossoms or bear their first fruit. This saves breeders thousands of hours of labor and reduces by as much as two-thirds the amount of time it takes to come up with new varieties. If you’re a tomato seed company working the most cutthroat market in the vegetable world, those two advantages can spell life or death. The same is true in the market for cucumbers, peppers, or potatoes.

“We are living in an agricultural food world rocked by change,” Keygene CEO Arjen van Tunen told the Continent’s biotech leaders at last year’s annual Euro-Bio conference in Lille in September. He went on to explain that tomato breeders compete to create new varieties so rapidly that the market lifespan of each new tomato is only five years. Seed companies—and growers—that fail to meet ever tougher demands for better taste and longer shelf life are soon out of business. All of which puts enormous pressure on the biotech labs.