Grape tomato
class of tomatoes
A grape tomato is a kind of tomato believed to be of southeast Asian origin, shaped similarly to the oval plum tomatoes but having the small size and some of the sweetness of cherry tomatoes. Grape tomatoes produce small and typically oblong fruits. Introduced to the worldwide market in the 1990s, they have gained substantial popularity, due at least in part to their higher sugar content compared to regular tomatoes, and due to their smaller, bite-sized shape.
A commercially significant variety, the "Santa F1", was introduced into the United States market in 1997 by grower Andrew Chu, who obtained the seeds from Taiwan's Known-You Seed Company. Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation (PBSC) in Philadelphia acquired global exclusivity of this fruit and has aggressively marketed it under its subsidiary Santa Sweets, Inc.
The Santa F1 variety is rare in seed form, being offered only by a few seed houses around the world (the United Kingdom's Thompson & Morgan has sporadically featured the variety in its catalog from time to time); some gardeners report the seed can breed true out to six or more generations, an assertion that has received little notice from most gardening authorities. Other grape tomato cultivars, such as Rosalita, are more widely available to home gardeners.
“Grape tomato” enters the record as class of tomatoes. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Grape, tomato and class can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5597009. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grape tomato” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.