Festive as a birthday present, the new square watermelon comes encased in its own cubic rind. A squat doughnut peach looks more like a UFO than the familiar summer thirst-quencher. A few rows over, there’s a rainbow of mongrel hybrids: peaches crossed with nectarines, plums with apricots. Fruit is looking mighty different these days.

You could be forgiven for assuming that some futuristic, gene-splicing technology is at play. In fact, all these varieties are grown by low-tech methods. The watermelons naturally take on the shape of the glass boxes they’re grown in. The doughnut peach, a descendant of the Chinese flat peach, has been grown in the United States since the 1800s. And crossbreeding—whether it’s between two varieties of the same fruit or between two different species—is still as painstaking as ever, requiring only patience and a lot of Q-tips for pollen rubbing. This type of plant breeding hasn’t changed much since Gregor Mendel (the Moravian monk who discovered genetics) grew his first peas some 150 years ago. But we, the consumers, have. Novelty items are now bred to catch our ever-shortening attention spans. (The boxy watermelons, which taste no better than good-quality ovoids and fetch upwards of $60, are an obvious example.) Others, such as the Honeydew Nectarine (as sweet as a melon, but no relation), have been specially developed to appeal to our penchant for sweeter flavours.

But one mongrel is fast becoming a breed in its own right. In less than a decade, the Pluot, a 75/25 plum-apricot cross, has captured a quarter of the U.S. plum market, making the transition from high-end novelty item to supermarket staple. Developed and patented by Floyd Zaiger of Zaiger’s Genetics in Modesto, California, the Pluot was not the first plum-apricot hybrid to hit the fruit stand. That distinction is held by the plumcot, a 50/50 cross developed more than 100 years ago by another Californian, Luther Burbank, who is widely considered the father of modern plant breeding (and modern plums—he developed 113 new varieties on his Santa Rosa farm). But it was Zaiger who came up with the sweet idea of crossing the plumcot with another plum to create an even more chin-dribbling hybrid.

It was an instant hit. Even such committed traditionalists as Alice Waters, the famed restaurateur, sing its virtues. Some 25 varieties are now grown worldwide from Chile to Israel, France (where Zaiger has been honoured with an Order du Merit Agricole for his contributions to good taste) to New Zealand.