The “Failed” Japanese Tomato That Accidentally Conquered American Kitchens

Every summer, farmers markets throughout the US become festooned with tiny, vibrant orange globes. Then, sometime in September, they vanish until the following year. These sweet, bright tomatoes are Sungolds, the darling of gardeners, farmers, home cooks, and chefs across the nation. It’s the tomato’s notably sweet and complex flavor that fans rave about, and the variety is often described as the perfect way to convert a tomato hater.

“My first experience with Sungolds was in the summer of 2010, and it was a transformative, poetic experience, to say the least,” says Jason Grauer, executive director of Stone Barns Farms Center for Food & Agriculture in New York’s Westchester County. “It sucks you into this whole new world of flavor. It was like I’d never tasted a tomato before.” 

At farmers stalls and vegetable stands, it’s been a given for decades that these tomatoes are consistent bestsellers, Grauer says. The Sungold, a cherry tomato hybrid that yields fruits about an inch in diameter, is the one tomato that always sells out, no matter what. It grows easily and prolifically and, in the Northeast, bears fruit from around early June to September, even for novice growers.

“They are so consistently delicious,” says Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. “It could be raining the whole month or dry the whole month, and they’ll turn out great. It’s a magical tomato.”

Barber is one of many chefs who eagerly await the Sungold’s arrival each year. Across the country, chefs enthusiastically incorporate it into their summer menus. At Gramercy Tavern in New York City, chilled cucumber soup is topped with Sungolds. At the Los Angeles outpost of Girl and the Goat, pan-roasted salmon comes garnished with Sungold tomato halves and spiced sunflower seeds. And at Vicia in St. Louis, chef Michael Gallina’s eggplant schnitzel arrives with Sungold tomatoes, pickled banana peppers, and a scallion vinaigrette. 

The Sungold has developed a devoted following, and what makes its success so remarkable, especially in an age of staggeringly expensive advertising campaigns, is that not a single cent was spent promoting it. “Without any marketing effort, Sungold has naturally been accepted by home gardeners and small professional growers, resorts, and chefs, because the taste is good,” says Iwao “Ike” Tokita, CEO and president of Tokita Seeds, the company that developed the Sungold. “That’s the beauty of this variety.”

Land of the Rising Sungold

As delicious and successful as the Sungold is today, it took almost four decades and numerous failures for the tomato to become as delicious and successful as it is today. 

In botany, it’s said that a hybrid plant needs approximately seven generations—roughly a decade for tomatoes—before it becomes genetically stable and produces consistently from seed. Tokita Seeds embraced this long game, sustained across three generations of leadership: Taisuke Tokita founded the company in 1917 and began exporting vegetable seeds to the US in 1955; his son, Tsutomu, who became president and CEO in 1973; and his grandson, Ike, the current president and CEO. 

In 1984, under Tsutomu’s leadership, Tokita Seeds introduced the Suncherry, Japan’s first cherry tomato. Coming in clusters of glossy ruby red fruits, the Suncherry is bite-size, sweet, and resistant to cracking—and it became an instant hit. Despite the company’s lack of marketing, it captured 80% of Japan’s cherry tomato market by 1997. Today, Tokita Seeds still commands a 50% market share for cherry tomatoes in Japan.

Aiming to build on the Suncherry’s success, Tsutomu set out to develop variations on the type. Among them was a not-yet-named orange cherry tomato whose breeding began in 1983. In 1987, what would later be called the Sungold entered its trials—the years-long process by which a company proves that a plant is stable and distinct enough from existing breeds to be scientifically and legally considered its own variety. 

In 1989, Tokita Seeds introduced a range of colorful cherry tomatoes to Japan. Among those tomatoes was the ultra-sweet, cheerfully bright orange variety. Tokita hoped the new tomatoes would win the same enthusiastic reception as the Suncherry did five years earlier.

Surprisingly, the little orange tomato failed to win fans in Japan. And today, it remains virtually unknown in its native country.

The Sungold Comes to America

When a seed can’t find a grasp in rocky ground, sometimes it’ll luck out, and the wind will blow it to more fertile soil. For the Sungold, that fruitful land turned out to be the West.

Convinced that his orange cherry tomato could be a success if it found the right market, Tsutomu Tokita pressed on—starting with a name. He personally selected “Sungold,” placing it squarely in the company’s “Sun” family of cherry tomatoes. The tomato’s reddish orange hue, his son Ike recalls, likely reminded his father of gold.

According to the company’s own records, Tokita Seeds officially announced Sungold’s name in 1992, the same year the company introduced the tomato to the international market. They began with the UK. British gardeners quickly embraced it for its sweetness and ease of cultivation, making the UK one of Sungold’s strongest markets. Sales have grown every year, except for the one following Brexit, when new trade rules slowed Japanese seed shipments.

The company says word about Sungolds soon spread to the United States, where eager gardeners looked for seeds via online forums and from British seed retailers, such as Thompson & Morgan, and even had friends mail them directly. 

A 1991 seed catalogue from the Maine-based company Johnny’s Selected Seeds complicates Tokita’s official timeline. Rob Johnston, the company’s founder, recalls mailing a seed catalog featuring the Sungold in November or December 1990, and the company began mailing seeds to customers soon after.

In that catalog, Johnston noted, “Sun Gold [sic] is one of the most talked about in our trials by both Johnny’s staff and visitors alike.” That excitement about the Sungold echoed his own first reaction to trying the tomato, recorded in recently rediscovered handwritten notes from his field trial: “[O]range fruits have a yummy ‘tropical’ or ‘winey’ taste. Vigorous, tall vines.”

This black-and-white photo shows clusters of Sungolds cascading down a vine, captioned “SUN GOLD—For orange cherry tomatoes galore and Sun Gold’s flavor can’t be beat.” 

According to Johnston, Thompson & Morgan first listed Sungold in both their 1992 UK and American catalogs, so it’s possible that the Sungold actually came to the US first, contrary to the company’s version of events. “Remember, this was all happening about four to six years before rudimentary internet marketing and probably 10 years before significant social media,” Johnston said in an email. (Thompson & Morgan did not respond to an interview request for this story. Tokita indicated it was revising its company history in light of the findings from Johnston’s notes.)

Regardless of who introduced it first, the Sungold arrived in a US market hungry for novelty. What Tokita, Johnny’s, and an untold number of unsung gardeners had unleashed was a new tomato in an America that was starving for a new tomato. It’s hard to understate how anemic a selection of tomatoes the average American customer had back in the early 1990s, when supermarket tomatoes were bred less for flavor than for durability—designed to ship well, last long, and look decent, even if they tasted bland. Sungold’s sweet, bright flavor felt revolutionary.

“I still remember my first trip to the US almost 40 years ago,” Tokita says. “I saw a big truck carrying a harvested green pepper—at least I thought it was a green pepper—but it was a tomato. And my father said, ‘In America, they harvest it green and put the gas to make it red,’” referring to the practice of ripening produce with ethylene gas in transit to increase shipments and thus profitability. “And I thought, ‘No wonder it doesn’t taste good! Nothing tastes good in America!’”

Everywhere you looked, bland, watery beefsteak tomatoes dominated the produce aisle. In restaurants and dining rooms, beefsteaks might have added a splash of color to your plate, but offered little flavor. Some American cookbooks tried to steer home cooks toward Roma tomatoes, but outside of farmers markets and home gardens, even those were scarce.

When Sungold seeds became available in the US, the tomato quickly became a favorite. Its appeal lay in what Myra Manning, general manager of Tokita Seed America, calls its “monstrous vigor and easy-to-manage structure.” In other words, Sungolds are almost always healthy, highly productive, and simple to grow. The tomato was an instant hit among home gardeners.

Among those early US Sungold growers was Christopher Kimball, founder of the magazine Milk Street, who grew them “long before” they were commonly sold at markets, he says. Steve Bellavia, a product manager at Johnny’s Selected Seeds, compares the rise of Sungold tomatoes in the US to other runaway produce success stories, such as sugar snap peas, Fortex green beans, Carmen peppers, Zephyr summer squash, and Delicata squash. Today, the Sungold accounts for half of Tokita Seeds’ international tomato seed sales. 

Farm to Table

As Sungolds gained popularity among home gardeners and small commercial growers, they soon caught the attention of chefs eager for high-quality, local ingredients to enhance their menus. According to Grauer, it was chefs who truly pushed Sungolds into the mainstream, spreading them by word of mouth through the restaurant community —a powerful grassroots endorsement from America’s tastemakers.

“Chefs, and restaurants especially, have been the trendsetters,” Grauer says. “Chefs are incredible mouthpieces for the farmers and seed companies.” 

Barber says Sungold tomatoes have become a reliable component of the summer menus at Blue Hill, proving versatile both in salads and cooked down to a sauce with an “incredibly deep, tomato-y flavor.”

“A lot of tomatoes out there, especially the ones grown hydroponically, are sweet but have no tomato flavor,” he says. “When they’re grown in soil, Sungolds manage to have both. Plus, the tomatoes have this beautiful texture that creates this popping sensation. There’s a viscosity to the skin, and when you pop it in your mouth, you get this sunburst of sweet tomato flavor.” While other varieties of fresh tomatoes may taste flat when cooked, Sungolds retain their exceptional balance when used in a sauce or purée.

One unintended consequence of Sungold’s cachet among small-scale growers: Many mistake it for an heirloom tomato, which adds to its appeal among gourmets and locavore-friendly restaurateurs. One recipe on the Institute for Culinary Education’s website, for example, touts the thoroughly modern, Japanese-created hybrid as a local New York heirloom variety.

The Future Looks Bright

Delicious and easy to grow, the Sungold is more popular than ever—but it isn’t perfect. Since its debut, seed companies, including Tokita, have tried to improve it. The most commonly cited issue is that the tomato splits, an unintended consequence of the genetic gamble Tokita took to boost sweetness. That fragility makes Sungolds difficult to ship, which is why the tomato is much more frequently sold at farmers markets rather than at grocery stores. 

“The sweeter the fruits, the quicker the splitting,” Bellavia says. “Gardeners and growers just have to accept that that is the price to pay for the eating quality.” Manning adds that Sungolds’ high sugar, thin skin, and quick ripening make them especially sensitive to shifts in weather or water availability. 

Despite decades of effort, Tokita has yet to breed a true successor to the Sungold. “We’ve tried to add disease resistance, for example, but we lost the taste,” Ike Tokita explains. Such trade-offs are common in hybrid breeding, where improving one trait often sacrifices another. When scientists add one desirable attribute to a plant, such as sugar content, they often find that they lose another quality or introduce a new, undesirable trait, such as splitting or a lack of disease resistance. 

Naturally, Tokita Seeds isn’t the only company trying to find the next Sungold. Exceptionally sweet cherry tomato varieties, such as Isis Candy (bred in New Jersey by a member of the nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange) and Green Envy (developed by Burpee Seeds) have appeared, though there is yet to emerge a challenger mighty enough to knock off Sungold’s crown.

“There have been releases of a lot of small, orange cherry tomatoes that have thicker skin or longer shelf life, but we have never found anything that meets the quality of the Sungold,” Grauer says. 

Nevertheless, Ike Tokita has high hopes for a particular new tomato cultivar: the Tomatoberry Orange, slated for release later this year or early next. A cross between the Sungold and another existing Tokita red cherry tomato called the Tomatoberry, the Tomatoberry Orange has the more robust traits that often translate to increased productivity for larger growers. Plus, it’s shaped like a heart or strawberry, “so it catches the consumer’s eye,” Tokita says. He adds that it doesn’t crack, has “wonderful” disease resistance, and seems to retain the Sungold’s signature flavor.

“It’s quite rare when we add disease resistance without losing good traits, especially taste,” Tokita says. “But with the Tomatoberry Orange, I am very happy. I hope that you can see for yourself sometime soon.”