- There is a new Jersey tomato in town and it's got scientists, farmers, and just Jersey fresh lovers talking.

Rutgers University today officially unveiled its latest tomato variety called the Scarlet Sunrise.

It took nearly a decade of research, crossbreeding, trial and error to perfect it and it made its public debut today at the university's annual tomato tasting event where visitors got a first bite and a behind the scenes look at the science that brought it to life.

Raven Santana was there and even got to try one.

She joins us now from the event.

Hey Raven.

Hi Brie.

Yes, the star of the show is a Jersey tomato and it's called a Scarlet Sunrise.

It's a sweet, crack-resistant grape tomato that took researchers over 10 years to perfect.

And today, the public will get to taste it at this annual tomato tasting event.

10 out of 10.

10 out of 10.

Super sweet.

Mmm.

Delicious.

Juicy.

Scale of 1 to 10.

Developed by Rutgers scientists Peter Nisch and Tom Orton, the Scarlet Sunrise blends the firmness of a traditional grape tomato with the sweetness and striking color of a bi-color variety.

In this case, Tom and I got together and we were working with a seed company with a red grape tomato that they had, a commercial red grape, which tasted great.

But we realized quickly that in the marketplace, good tasting red grape tomatoes look exactly like not so great tasting red grape tomatoes.

So we decided to try and make an identifiable grape tomato.

We did this by, well Tom did this mostly in the greenhouse, by moving the pollen from one tomato plant to another.

We identified an heirloom variety called Isis Candy, which is a cherry tomato, which tastes good but cracks a lot.

And so he crossed that with the red grape commercial variety to give it some crack resistance, give it that grape tomato shape, and the result is Scarlet Sunrise.

Visitors were able to taste dozens of tomato the farm and meet the rese cross pollinating to bring from the lab to the field get it to market.

We're w available to farmers and farmers battling heat and heavy rain this season.

The launch of Scarlet Sunrise offers a little good news for Jersey agriculture.

So in addition to tasting, there's also wagon tours because what's so important to this annual event is also education.

Yeah, we have a lot of different faculty doing all kinds of research and agriculture and natural resources.

So lots of interesting projects that the public learn about what we're doing to help the farmers, local farmers and protect the environment at the same time.

You talked about having a really tough growing season.

Can you elaborate as to why?

It's been tough because early on we had a lot of rain, some water soaked fields, hard to plant.

And also that's a lot of rain encourages diseases, fungal diseases, likes moisture.

And then it got hot, really hot.

And tomatoes, while they like it warm, it gets above 90 degrees, 70 degrees at night.

If the flowers don't pollinate well, sometimes they actually drop off and abort.

- And right behind where we're standing, you are actually working on a new variety of tomatoes.

- Yeah, so this is Scarlet Sunrise here, which gets over eight feet tall.

You can see it taller than me.

And we're working to make it a more compact plant.

So this is hard to manage sometimes for farmers and gardeners.

We're working to make a Scarlet Sunrise that's shorter, I'm not sure what we're going to name it.

So whether you're a farmer, a foodie, or just someone who loves Jersey tomatoes, the event is a chance to see and taste the science behind the Scarlet Sunrise.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Raven Santana.

[ Music ]