Tropic’s reduced-browning banana moves closer to sale in England after Defra decision

Tropic’s reduced-browning banana has cleared a regulatory step toward sale in England: Defra has confirmed its precision-bred status. The decision does not put the fruit on supermarket shelves. A food-safety review and market authorisation still stand between the banana and shoppers, and no date for a launch has been established.

Defra published the marketing-notice record for the banana on 25 September. The record brings together the notice, responses to questions from the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, the committee’s advice and the Secretary of State’s decision. The confirmation establishes the plant’s status under England’s precision-breeding rules; it is one of the requirements for placing the fruit on the market.

What the decision covers

Tropic developed the banana using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. According to the company’s application recorded in the Defra documents, edits to three copies of a gene called PPO1 are intended to reduce production of polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme involved in browning. The application reports less browning in post-harvest tests against a conventional banana line. That test result does not establish how much food consumers or retailers would save.

The government record concerns a specific reduced-browning banana line intended for import, retail and consumption like conventional bananas. Precision-bred status addresses the type of genetic change made to the plant. As the Guardian explains, the category covers changes that could have been achieved through traditional breeding and excludes DNA from unrelated species. It does not, by itself, amount to permission to sell the fruit as food.

Why browning matters

A banana that stays yellow after peeling or slicing could be easier to use in prepared fruit salads and breakfast pots, Gershon said. Its value would depend on whether that longer-lasting appearance changes what businesses stock and what people eat or discard. Brown colour is only one reason bananas may be rejected, so reduced browning cannot be treated as a measured reduction in overall waste.

There is a substantial waste problem behind the company’s pitch, although the figures often cited are old. Reporting in 2017 on figures from the waste advisory body WRAP said Britain discarded about 1.4 million edible bananas a day. In the same account, 30% of surveyed consumers said they had thrown away a banana because of a minor bruise or black mark on its skin. Those figures describe the period of that research, not a current daily total.

Tropic has projected that its banana could cut food waste and supply-chain greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 25%. It has also suggested that use across the banana export market could save more than nine million tonnes of emissions annually. The Guardian reported those estimates as company claims. Neither the regulatory status decision nor the cited browning tests demonstrate that those savings will occur.

What happens before a sale

The next reported step is a Food Standards Agency review of the product’s safety. Prof Cathie Martin, a John Innes Centre scientist who has worked on gene-edited tomatoes, told the Guardian that the length of that review was unclear. At the time of the Guardian’s 28 September report, no precision-bred organism had received market authorisation for sale in England.

England’s precision-bred plant regulations came into effect in November 2025. The Guardian reported that authorised precision-bred foods placed on the English market can also be sold in Wales and Scotland under specified conditions. That route depends first on authorisation in England; Defra’s confirmation of this banana’s status alone does not establish availability anywhere in the UK.

Gershon said Tropic had gained regulatory approval for the banana in other countries and that the fruit was already being grown in Latin America. Those overseas developments do not settle the English food-safety review. For UK shoppers, the decisive unanswered questions are when that review will finish, whether market authorisation will follow and when a retailer might offer the fruit.