Cotton Candy grapes

Development

David Cain was a fruit geneticist and former USDA researcher who co-founded IFG in Bakersfield in 2001. A few months after forming the company, he attended a trade show where researchers from the University of Arkansas were showing grapes. One was a purple Concord grape that tasted sweet like cotton candy, but was fragile with tiny seeds. He licensed that grape and began working to improve the size and texture by crossbreeding the grapes with sturdier California grapes. He hand pollinated to cross pollinate millions of grapes to combine the sweet Concord grapes with common grapes in order to make them firmer. Pollen from male grape flowers was extracted and brushed onto the female clusters of the target plant. Over twelve years, a hundred thousand plants were created and grown in test tubes before developing the Cotton Candy variety of grape. In 2010, IFG patented the grape and began licensing it to growers, including California grower Grapery. Grapery was founded in 1996 by Jack Pandol, a UC Davis plant scientist graduate and third generation grape grower, and was co-owned by fellow grower Jim Beagle.