Waitrose to stock the UK's first 'tearless' onions from next month

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Shoppers will be able to get their hands on onions that stop amateur cooks from sobbing over the chopping board from next week.

Waitrose has announced it will stock so-called Sunions, which are the first ‘tearless and sweet onions’ available in the UK.

The food product will be ideal for those with sensitive eyes and parents who enjoy cooking with their children. Sunions are the invention of Rick Watson, a plant breeder working for the German chemical company BASF.

He began working on the innovation in the late 1980s, using natural techniques rather than genetic modification to create the unique variety.The brand said it took more than 30 years of breeding less pungent varieties of onion to find a variety where the vapours released on chopping are not powerful enough to bring tears to the eye.Sunions said its onions are not a genetically modified product and were grown through an all-natural cross-breeding programme.It said volatile compounds in onions are responsible for the tears and pungent flavour, and the amounts of those compounds in other onions remain the same or increase over time.