While farmers and backyard gardeners are beginning to plant and care for their tomato seedlings, scientists at H.J. Heinz Co. are busy trying to breed a sweeter tomato in hopes that it will help them save on the pricey corn syrup currently used in ketchup. The price of corn has been soaring, partially due to the boom in ethanol use, and has increased Heinz bottom line.

Ketchup can be found in 97% of American homes, and in half of those Heinz is the ketchup of choice. In the restaurant business, Heinz is just as dominant. At any given moment, the Heinz factory is busy pumping out millions of tiny ketchup packets. Heinz's success, says VP David Ciesinski, is a result of "the perfect recipe."

That perfect recipe includes, of course, tomatoes. But it also includes other ingredeitns such as spices, distilled vinegar, and high fructose corn syrup. The corn syrup is one ingredient that in recent years has begun to give the company headaches.

A bushel of corn that cost $2 four years ago now costs about $6. Corn is an important ingredient in many of the foods we eat, which are also on the rise in price.

As far as the ketchup industry goes, the corn syrup acts as a sweetener and accounts for about 10% of the overall cost of a bottle of ketchup. If Heinz were able to grow tomatoes that naturally contain more sugar, they could save money on corn sweetener.

Research and development of these sweeter tomatoes is currently going on at Heinz's research center in Stockton, CA. The center supplies seeds for many of the processed tomatoes grown in the state of California.

At Heinz, scientists don't do any genetic engineering to create their plants. Instead, they do it the old-fashioned way: producing hybrid seeds. Once the seeds are created, they are tested outside in the real world on an experimental farm.

Heinz's challenge now is to create a tomato with increased sugar content, but without sacrificing other desirable qualities such as thickness, color, and yield.