This New Kind of Cantaloupe Will Totally Change Your Fruit Salad

If you've always been put off by cantaloupe, but you're still pro-melon, good news: Walmart is trying to change that with their new version of the fruit. Walmart collaborated with Bayer to develop the "Sweet Spark" cantaloupe, which is 40% sweeter as an average cantaloupe you'd buy in the winter—making it possible to eat a cantaloupe that actually has flavor even if it's grown outside the typical season. "Problem is, the industry forgot about flavor along the way," Walmart spokesperson Molly Blakeman told Today.com. "We had cantaloupes that were firm and looked nice on the shelf, but they didn't really taste like cantaloupes."

In addition, cantaloupes were previously chosen to make the super long trek from Central America--not for their taste. “They’re engineered to make a 3,000-mile trip, so they look good but taste like a piece of wood,’’ Shawn Baldwin, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s senior vice president for produce and global food sourcing, told Bloomberg. “So we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have that summer melon taste in the fall?’”

Even Walmart has a hard time selling cantaloupes in the winter, and that's exactly why the Sweet Spark--named after the yellow sunburst in the corporation's logo--came into existence. Sweet Spark is a result of over 20 different kinds of seeds and six months worth of analysis. The "designer" cantaloupes, which aren't genetically modified, are currently available in 200 stores in the U.S. and will be rolled out fully in the autumn, according to Bloomberg. Another new fruit to look forward to.