He wondered if anything could be done to bring tastier strawberries to Singapore. The thought stuck with him throughout his studies at the National University of Singapore, and it eventually became the driving force behind Singrow, the agri-genomics firm Bao founded in 2019.
When Bao Shengjie first arrived in Singapore for his PhD studies a decade ago, he noticed that strawberries here tasted drastically different from those he had enjoyed in Ningbo, China.
The molecular biologist dug deeper and found two main reasons for Singapore’s sour berries. “One, strawberries sold here are harvested prematurely in order to accommodate the long shipping time to arrive in Singapore. Two, the ‘ever-bearing’ strawberry variety available here has a longer shelf life but is sour in taste,” Bao tells The Edge Singapore.
