The Hustle: Why Growing Pink Pineapples Is Illegal

The Hustle is a digital media channel of the Hubspot Media Network of inbound media brands, producing insightful video essays and documentaries about major moves in business, tech and entrepreneurship.

A pineapple grown in Costa Rica can sell for $400 in the U.S. — and it's illegal to buy, sell, or even grow in the country that produces it. That's not an accident. It's the direct result of a mistake Del Monte made in the 1990s, when it spent 30 years developing the Golden Pineapple, tripled U.S. pineapple sales, and then lost control of the whole thing — because a farmer hired to grow it leaked it, and eventually Dole was growing the exact same fruit in Honduras. Del Monte never had the right patent. The secret was out. So with the PinkGlow — a GMO engineered to convert its own lycopene into pink flesh instead of yellow — they built a legal fortress instead: plant patents, utility patents, registered trademarks, and a biosafety law that turns the Costa Rican government into their enforcement arm.

NODEHAUS handled the entire post-production for this piece — from ingesting, archival research, editing, motion-graphics animation, sound and color.

Original link: https://youtu.be/tufNXRHmuls

• Credits

  Client: Hubspot - The Hustle

  Production Co: NODEHAUS

  Writer & Host: Caya

  Producer, Editing Manager: Taryn Varricchio

  Editor: Emily Mosier, Tran Hoang Calvin

  Graphics: Emily Mosier, Triston Centretto, Tran Hoang Calvin