Paul Watts, a scientist from the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, AFBI, has developed a purple potato using the chemical compound called anthocyanin, which is found in the blue of blueberries.
Paul said, “We developed Purple Magic after years of screening through large numbers of seedlings and picking the best. The plant needed to be high-yielding, with disease-resistance qualities, so we crossed some flavourful heritage varieties with some of the hardy varieties you’d see in the supermarket. The idea was to boost the overall levels of anthocyanins by having them in the flesh as well as the skin.”
This has been a long process, as, Paul indicates, is usual when generating new crop varieties. “We made the first cross for Purple Magic back in 2003 – that’s 13 years of research that has gone into this product.”
The purple potato has a high dry matter content, which means that it has strong flavour, while still being fryable - to be turned into crisps and chips. This is critical because Paul feels Purple Magic will enter the mass-market as a processed product firstly, with sales of the actual potato in supermarkets only coming later with further development. The potato is a niche variety that will initially be more suitable for markets, restaurants and speciality shops. On the crisp side, already, Purple Magic is being marketed in the US and Canada under a sub-license with Solanum International. A major chip manufacturer in North America called Terra Chips has used Purple Magic to make blue potato chips with a distinctive white ring around the edge.
AFBI will continue to hold the licensing rights for the potato, with full IP protection being put into place now, while distribution is handled by experts like Solanum.
