A Tomato Hall of Fame

By Cheryl Angelina Koehler

 

I love baseball… well, at least I do when an actual baseball fan drags me to a game and tells me where to look. My allegiance ran with the Baltimore Orioles in their red-hot years of the late 1970s, and I was rooting for the Oakland A’s in 1989 when the Bay Bridge World Series got upstaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake.

In recent decades, I’ve been following a totally different sort of team, one that trains in a different type of park. Its players sport names like Raya Rey, Lucky Bee, Cherry Wine, Amalfi Orange, Benevento Marmo, and Marzano Fire, and the fans collecting their trading cards include tomato growers all over the world plus a bunch of Bay Area chefs and three local businessmen, the latter betting on a win at the World Series of Tomatoes.

Tied for MVP are Benevento, a gorgeous striped slicer (that some might incorrectly call an heirloom); and Green Bee, a unique cherry tomato that stays green and crunchy when ripe. Insiders also have their eye on Marzano Fire, a sturdy sauce-type tomato (also good for eating fresh) that leaves Roma in the dust and even gives the Italian San Marzano a run for its money. All three F1 hybrids were created by plant breeder and Artisan Seeds founder Fred Hempel, who unexpectedly stepped away from the earth on October 31, 2023, at the all-too-early age of 63.

“His tomatoes are eye-catchingly pretty. People will enter your stand at the farmers’ market because you’ve got them out front,” says Matthew Sylvester of Happy Acre Farm, who continues to grow quite a few of Hempel’s tomatoes, peppers, and mustards on the farm’s acres adjacent to Hempel’s larger plot at the Sunol AgPark. Hempel was the first farmer to sign up when the AgPark was established in 2006 as an education-oriented space for small farmers who follow organic practices.

 

 

“I would trade tractor work or olive oil for a bunch of tomato seeds or starts,” adds Sylvester, who misses those “roadside chats” with Hempel when the senior farmer might offer seeds in envelopes bearing hand-typed notes about new varieties he was developing. “He would pull them out of his jacket like we were doing a drug deal.”

Alex Hempel (25) says he doesn’t remember a time when his dad was not breeding tomatoes. “He had them growing in our basement in Albany with grow lights and an indoor greenhouse breeding setup. At some point he started breeding in the Oxford Tract greenhouse in Berkeley, where he would do plants in the winter so he could have two breeding cycles per year. We were like 8 to 10, but we would help with the selections,” Alex says, referring to himself and his sister, Nicole. “We did taste testing, discussed which ones looked the best, and suggested crosses to try. His favorite way to taste them was somewhat thinly sliced with olive oil and salt. That was his gold standard way to test the tomatoes,” Alex adds.

Nicole thinks their father simply valued their honest opinions. “One of those crosses that my brother chose ended up being very successful; they named it Blush,” she says.

 

 

An elongated, striped cherry tomato, Blush was an early success for Hempel’s Artisan Seeds company. His goal was to provide Bay Area growers with locally adapted seeds for tomatoes and other specialty crops that caught his fancy.

But one has only to spend a little time on tomatoville.com or Hempel’s Artisan Seeds Facebook or Instagram pages to see that Hempel’s new hybrid and open pollinated varieties excited growers all over the world. When an Italian professor sent Hempel some family heirloom seeds from a sweet frying pepper, Hempel used them to create his Dolce di Minervino pepper. When an Ethiopian friend, Menkir Tamrat, brought seeds from his homeland to the AgPark, Hempel helped him develop a locally adapted mareko fana pepper (the backbone spice in a traditional Ethiopian berbere blend). A couple of years ago, Hempel developed a locally adapted Aleppo pepper at the request of this writer.

While seeds were Hempel’s ostensible stock in trade, plenty of good fresh produce came about in the process, and Hempel loved sharing that bounty with local chefs in exchange for their valuable feedback, which played into his seed selection process (and added some much-needed cash to his pocket).

Chef Matt Greco, who closed his Salt Craft bakery in Pleasanton in December, appreciated the sturdiness that Hempel bred into his tomatoes. He says that the large pretty tomatoes most people refer to as “heirlooms” don’t keep and will fall apart into a mess in a restaurant or catering situation, but Hempel’s gorgeous and flavorful Benevento keeps its shape when sliced. So, too, does his wildly popular Green Bee, which became like a totem to Hempel as evidenced by his recent decision to rename his farm from the original, Baia Nicchia (which means bay niche) to Green Bee Farm.

“If a chef has something obscure that they want, he’s always been willing to grow it for them,” says Alex Hempel. “You know, they’ve heard of this crazy new garnish or this crazy new herb or pepper and there’s just nowhere to source it, so they would approach him and say, ‘Hey, could you put in a row of this for me?’ One of the latest ones was sea bean [aka samphire]. His niche was growing those things before anyone else had them.”

Especially welcomed was Hempel’s aji amarillo, a hot Peruvian yellow pepper that Chef Anthony Paone of Port Costa’s Bull Valley Roadhouse immediately fermented into a hot sauce. Same with Chef Francis Hogan of Sabio on Main in Pleasanton, who even bottled and branded his aji amarillo sauce.

On his September 2021 menu, Chef Hogan featured fresh slices of aji amarillo in a hamachi ceviche garnished with Hempel’s aforementioned sea beans and some aji amarillo flowers, a perfect expression of the collaborations this chef and farmer duo enjoyed weekly thanks to the close proximity of their establishments. Hogan honored their collaboration with special producer dinners.

Aji amarillo was also a favorite with Chef Maurice Dissels of Oyo Pleasanton, who appreciated the pepper to flavor his Caribbean and South American dishes as much as he appreciated Hempel’s friendship. “He shared his burgeoning passion for growing Ethiopian grains,” Dissels writes, recalling a particular dinner that Hempel hosted on his farm. “It was there that I learned about the similarities between the microclimates of Ethiopia and California, which allowed these unique grains to flourish.”

Diane Dovholuk, who served for decades as kitchen gardener for Livermore’s Wente Vineyards before going off on her own, recalls Hempel picking squash blossoms at six in the morning so they would be at their delicate best for his chefs. Dominating her kitchen counter on a March 2024 visit was one of Hempel’s huge butternut rugosa squash. Crates of the behemoths were left over from Fred’s last harvest, and in December, Chef Hogan took the whole lot to Sabio, honoring his farmer friend’s work in a host of winter and spring dishes like a caramelized soup that he served with guanciale hush puppies, sage, and deep-green Styrian pumpkin seed oil.

As Dovholuk discusses Hempel’s incessant networking with chefs and other growers, I’m reminded of a term from permaculture—stacking functions—that seems apt in the way Hempel was always looking for mutual benefits in a sort of what’s good for the chef is good for the farmer way, as if the two were companion plantings in the field. Both Dovholuk and Kanoa Dinwoodie of Feral Heart Farm (another of Hempel’s Ag Park neighbors) brought up how the Ethiopian mustard greens that Hempel first planted in the aforementioned 2011 collaboration with Menkir Tamrat seemed to prompt Hempel’s hunch that the greens could serve as an edible cover crop in a no-till farming practice. As those mustard greens began robustly filling Hempel’s winter fields, they became a favorite with chefs like Charlie Zawde (of former Berkeley Ethiopian restaurant Finfine), Sean Baker (formerly with Berkeley’s Gather), Chef James Syhabout of Two-Star Michelin Commis, and Sabio’s Chef Hogan, to name a few.

“Fred appreciated meeting new plants,” Dovholuk simply puts it.

Sibella Krauss, whose nonprofit, SAGE (Sustainable Agriculture Education), formerly oversaw programs at the Sunol AgPark, appreciated Hempel’s skills as an educator. She recalls his valiant attempt at growing yuzu in the early years of the AgPark, a time when that now-popular East Asian citrus was hardly known in mainstream dining circles. Chef Dissels treasures an ice plant Hempel gave him, which now serves as a living screen that sets off his patio seating in front of Oyo. And recently, I met another Hempel experiment, a prized white alpine strawberry plant that an Edible East Bay’s editorial advisor, Roberta Klugman, has tended since around 2010.

Lynn Allen of Cross Road Growers in Livermore would seem to be speaking for many farmers when she says, “Fred was a great inspiration to us. My son and I first met Fred at his farm for a seminar we signed up for. We were the only ones there and we walked away saying, ‘I guess we’re growing Fred’s tomatoes,’ which we have now for four years. This year we’re growing Agi Red, Golden Cherry Wine, Green Bee, Lucky Bee, Pink Cherry Wine for cherries and Amalfi Orange, Amalfi Pink, Benevento, and Benevento Marmo for beefsteaks, and Marzano Fire. We will be selling to some restaurants and four farmers’ markets [the two in Livermore plus the San Ramon and Fremont/Niles markets]. We also sold tomato starts earlier this year.”

Fred Hempel had many loyal friends who followed and invested in his work. Among them are the three “businessmen” referred to in the baseball riff at the start of this story: Oliver Ratcliffe, Omer Ayfer, and Christian Ibarra.

Ratcliffe befriended Hempel in the mid-’90s when both were in post-graduate studies, and a few years later, he helped Hempel get a scientist position with Mendel Biotechnology in Hayward, where Ratcliffe was working as a researcher.

“Fred was charged with analyzing some truly enormous tomato field trials that Mendel was conducting as a collaboration with Seminis Vegetable Seeds in Woodland, California,” Ratcliffe says. “It was this work that inspired Fred’s passion for tomatoes. He recognized the almost infinite variation that can be produced by breeding, but he became very frustrated that the big seed companies were all about yield and harvesting efficiency and were much less interested in breeding tasty nutritious tomato varieties that looked great.” Hempel quit Mendel in 2005 to start his own breeding-focused company, Baia Nicchia.

Omer Ayfer, currently a tech contractor, also worked with Hempel at Mendel. Ayfer says that one of his first observations upon arrival in the U.S. from his native Turkey was that there was something wrong with the tomatoes.

“Like, why is there zero flavor?”

Back home in Turkey, tomatoes were ripened on the vine, not on the truck like most of them seemed to be in the United States, but here were his friend Fred’s gorgeous tomato varieties with long shelf life plus the vivid flavors Ayfer longed for.

“I was really excited about Fred’s idea, and I wanted to be involved and invest in his business,” Ayfer says. “Right before the pandemic, Fred approached us, asking for a loan of, like, ones of thousands of dollars. So we said to him, ‘Look, for like 14–15 years into this, you have an amazing product and we shouldn’t be talking about ones of thousands of dollars anymore. You should be saying: Let’s find an investor who can put in a serious amount of money, so we can start building this thing and start scaling and gaining more attention from wherever the customer is.’”

Ayfer had been observing his friend driving boxes of produce around to the chefs many days each week for what amounted to tiny sales. “That doesn’t scale,” Ayfer says. “What does scale is seeds. If you have an interesting enough new hybrid variety, the margins you can get on the sale of seeds is enormous. Seeds are shelf stable for years, so you don’t have to worry about the inventory spoiling by next week, and a tiny cup of seeds can be worth several thousands of dollars.”

In 2022, Ayfer, Ratcliffe, and Hempel formally created Bene Seeds with Hempel as the largest shareholder.

“The entity formally purchased the tomato germplasm from Fred,” says Ayfer. “Like his entire breeding program, so this made Fred a good chunk of cash and since he was still the largest shareholder in the company, it wasn’t like him selling his life’s work.” They also offered shares to Hempel’s friends and family who had contributed to his many fundraising cycles.

At the December 2023 memorial for Hempel at Sabio—where Chef Francis Hogan served what Ayfer called “a beautifully carmelized” soup made from one of those butternut rugosa squash—Ayfer met Fred’s “90-something-year-old” father.

“I had this choked-up moment when he was shaking my hand, and he goes ‘You’re gonna keep the tomatoes going, right?’ Yes, no pressure, but like, yes, that’s the idea,” Ayfer says, adding that it would have been a tense moment if it weren’t for the extreme good fortune of the partners having recently added their newest Bene Seeds partner, another friend of Fred’s, Christian Ibarra, who, like Fred, got his Ph.D. in molecular plant biology from UC Berkeley and thus understands Hempel’s daily farming and breeding work more than the others. Hempel and Ibarra missed each other at Cal by 10 years, but Ibarra describes their eventual meeting as happening within a Venn diagram of overlapping professional relationships. As Ibarra says this, I’m thinking that Fred himself was like the center of that Venn diagram as he moved through so many interconnected circles of biologists, farmers, and chefs (plus a few devoted journalists).

The Bene Seeds partners are now employing high-tech tools where Hempel largely used traditional techniques and intuition, and they are taking a more formal approach to breeding for disease resistance, which is of the utmost importance if Bene Seeds is going to win the commercial growers they will need to succeed. Breeding continues via a partnership that Hempel started with a farm in Mexico, and growers are doing field trials in various locations around the U.S.

The partners have set up Hempel’s field at the AgPark to be “like a showcase” for approximately 160 different tomato varieties, around half of which are Hempel’s work. “We have all these other collections,” Ayfer says, “some from [Fred’s] collaborators like Kanti Rawal and Steve Peters,” whom both Ayfer and Ibarra say are legendary in the tomato breeding community. Ibarra adds two more of note: “Karen Olivier, a backyard breeder up in Canada known for her big heart-shaped tomatoes, and we’re carrying on Fred’s work with a Southern California breeder named Hans Fama who is known for his work on an interesting Italian variety called piennolo that comes from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.”

In going forward with Bene Seeds, the partners are aware of a distinct disadvantage in no longer having Hempel on the team, both for his abilities to engage with the sensory experience and for his impulses to reach out through his community.

“As a far second to having lost a dear friend, one of our biggest losses is Fred’s subjective opinion on varieties,” Ayfer says. “It was all guided by Fred’s tastes, so what do we replace that with? For him, it was very much an art, much more so than a science.”

Ayfer describes their work in the field as “a lot of reverse engineering of what Fred was up to in his last year of breeding.”

“We’re looking at his field map going, ‘Oh, this must have been particularly interesting because you planted two times as much of this one, so let’s flag that.’ There are a bunch of unreleased varieties of his that we’re gonna find out about as the field grows up this season. We’ll see what he was up to with some of his selections and breeding work, so this is a learning year.”

Everyone I spoke with expressed regret that Hempel wouldn’t get to see the fruition of his life’s work in the (anticipated) success of Bene Seeds. Ayfer describes that success in a simple vision:

“How cool would it be if we can walk into some high-end grocery store or big box store and find Fred’s tomatoes.”

Everyone I spoke with agrees that the Benevento could be that MVP, the tomato that captures the mainstream market.

“Our weirdest tomato is Fred’s Green Bee,” says Afyer. “It’s super interesting, a very non-traditional tomato … my younger son’s favorite. We grow it in our backyard, and we hardly get any because [our son] goes out and eats them all.” Ibarra adds that his young daughter does the same thing.

Hempel might be happy to know that kids are still helping with his seed company’s selections. ♦

Learn more at beneseeds.com.

 

Writer's note: This story has been eliciting similar stories about Fred Hempel and his work. Here's an August 27 post from the folks at Bay Area–based company fruitqueen. The post describes even more encounters that farmers and customers had with Hempel that resulted in greater appreciation for the breeder's work and passions for creating community through good food.