Then 1 day, in 2003, Thomas Keller came by. His restaurant, the French Laundry, which would later earn 3 Michelin stars, happened to be in Yountville. “I remember, he had probably 10 different beans on the table. To get something that freshly dried was a revelation.” The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover. Called the Vallarta, it was on the verge of extinction when Sando found it, but it had a dense, fudgy texture and gave a good broth. “Steve had taken something that used to be just a dried bean and raised it to a new level, where the flavor was really intense and it cooked so much more consistently”. Within 1 month, it was a staple of the French Laundry. Within 1 year, every chef in California seemed to be serving beans.

2022-03-10: A huge bean collection

We have 36k different types of bean collected. Every single one has a story to tell and could be the solution to so many of our planetary challenges out there. Many of these beans have been collected over the last hundred years from around the world. And what’s really fascinating is most of these beans have never been characterized. The researchers don’t know how these beans grow what they look like, what environments they would thrive in. So, we’ve partnered with them to use our technology to understand those beans’ capabilities for the first time. It took us 30 years to produce a drought-tolerant bean where we found the trait for drought tolerance in one of these beans in the collection. With the technology of Mineral, we can move into absolute precision in finding these types of traits much quicker, much cheaper and much more efficiently.

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