Broccolini: how ‘fun time’ between vegetables spawned a side-dish star

Broccolini is not Italian. It is not a baby broccoli, or a sweeter broccoli rabe. It is a cross between regular old broccoli and gai lan, or Chinese kale, and it is only 31 years old. From high-stakes state dinners to weeknight sheet pan meals, broccolini seems to be everywhere. What does our love of this arriviste vegetable say about us?

This patented frankenvegetable was born in a greenhouse at the Japanese seed company Sakata Inc. “All of the breeders, using classical breeding techniques, are allowed a little bit of playtime – or let’s say ‘fun time’ – to experiment and try to create something new,” Dave Samuels, brand director for Sakata’s Europe division, told the Guardian. “And one of our broccoli breeders in his playtime created this long-stemmed broccoli that we all know and love.”

After eight years of finicky cross-breeding, it was finally ready for farmers in 1993.

Its origins become so entwined with the 90s that when it started to appear on menus, the Washington Post called it the Ally McBeal of vegetables.

“The key thing to understand is that new varieties of vegetables aren’t just something edible which goes out into the world,” the Observer’s restaurant critic, Jay Rayner , says. “They are licensed products like iPads and Skodas.

“It’s down to a clever, concerted approach to spending on the marketing of novelty. You’re bored of broccoli. Try this instead.”

Because of its long, asparagus-like stems, Sakata originally considered naming it “asparbroc”, before moving on to “asparation”. A 1998 article in the LA Times predicted “asparation will probably never become a staple vegetable”.

How far it has come. It is now the UK’s 25th most popular vegetable , according to YouGov, and the tenth most popular among millennials. Britons consume more of it than asparagus. Broccolini, or tenderstem broccoli, its other trade name, is consumed by 27.5% of all British households, and almost half of Australian households. The British eat 750 tonnes of broccolini a month. It is quite a feat, for a vegetable that has only been around for three decades – compared with, say, potatoes, which were domesticated 8,000 years ago.

It has also has appeared on the forks of the world’s most powerful people. When the Chinese president, Xi Jingping, visited the US in 2023, the pressure was on. Cue broccolini, a fitting western-Chinese hybrid, which he ate at least twice on his trip. The vegetable, served charred, was on the menu of a historic state luncheon Biden hosted for Xi. Later that week, Xi met with executives from Apple and BlackRock, talking business over “a $2,000-a-plate dinner of black Angus steak and broccolini”, the Financial Times reported .

Australian food writer Alice Zaslavsky doesn’t remember when she first tried broccolini, but she remembers learning that it was a trademarked vegetable while at a “hort con”, or horticulture conference.

“I thought: There’s money in brassicas.”

Sakata doesn’t grow broccolini and sell it to consumers. Instead, it licenses companies to grow and sell it in different countries, though it would not reveal how the licensing agreement works. In Australia, the sole licence is owned by Perfection Fresh.

Michael Simonetta, Perfection’s CEO, spotted broccolini at a trade show in the US in the late 1990s and he’s been “grateful every day since”.

“The moment I first laid eyes on it, I thought, ‘What the hell is this thing?’

“So I looked at it, I tasted it, I really liked it,” he said. “As a council of one, so to speak, I loved it.” (Scouting the world for new varieties of fresh produce is a large part of Simonetta’s job. And not everything works – one of his biggest failures was a beef tomato variety called “Success”.)

He could have marketed it as tenderstem or broccolini, and the choice was clear, he said. “I didn’t consider for one second calling it tenderstem in this country,” he said. As a person with Italian heritage, he liked that it had an Italian ring to it.

The name is “a bit cute sounding, it’s a bit like it’s a baby”, said Samuels.

The volume of broccolini consumed worldwide grows 20% every year, according to Sakata. In Australia, Perfection sells about 60m bunches of broccolini a year to supermarkets. At an average retail price of A$3.50 (at least three times the price, per 100 grams, of broccoli), that’s A$210m. Australia sees on average 10% growth annually – but the company isn’t expecting that for the next few years. (It is not popular in France, says Samuels, which he guessed was because of the country’s strong food culture, which is less “quick and convenient”.)

Now, there are alternative broccolini-esque vegetables appearing in independent grocers. One sold in Australia is called “broc-baby”. True broccolini’s US distributor, Mann Packing, has launched a campaign to educate consumers about the real thing. It wants restaurants to list the ingredient with the trademark on menus.

“Many US restaurants simply list ‘broccolini’ on the menu, without attributing the correct brand name and trademark that lets customers know they’re getting the real product — and not an inferior baby broccoli with a bitter taste, stringy stalk and hard texture,” Mann Packing writes in a recent press release.

One of the ways it is marketed, besides its conspicuously fancy, Italian-sounding name, is that you can eat the whole thing. This is one of the advantages over broccoli, for example. It also, said Rayner, has “a few functional qualities that broccoli does not”.

“Firstly, because of its shape, it does not hold moisture in the way traditional broccoli does, so a serving will not be waterlogged. Cooks appreciate that. Secondly, again because of its shape, it’s easier to char. All brassicas take well to charring, but it’s hard to do that with traditional broccoli, just because of the roundness. And thirdly, because of the shape, it’s easier to dress: you can pile it under breadcrumbs or hollandaise in the way you can’t the old stuff.”

“Don’t get me wrong, broccoli is great,” says chef Yotam Ottolenghi. “But broccolini fits in more seamlessly as a salad, a side or a stir-fry to go with rice or noodles.”

Broccolini takes up less space on a plate, he says. “It’s easier to eat and quicker to cook.”

And, says Samuels, “it’s a very Instagrammable vegetable, isn’t it”.

Is there is more to life than broccolini, this thin, conspicuously named, convenient, Instagrammable – sanitised, even – vegetable? Zaslavsky thinks so.

“It is time to embrace the things that were there before broccolini,” she says.

To love poor old broccoli, she says, one must “embrace the stalk”. Peeled and cooked, a broccoli stalk is sweeter than broccolini stem, and during periods of the year where broccolini isn’t in season, broccoli is much cheaper.

Vegetable trends come and go, she says., adding that the only trend people should be embracing is seasonality.