Open Heart Cos

In terms of popularity, cos lettuce is the strongest-growing lettuce type worldwide. This lettuce type has many favourable traits, such as a crispy, sweet flavour and a nice contrast in the mix from yellow to green. But cos lettuce is also susceptible to tipburn on the inner leaves and is quick to turn pink after cutting. With Open Heart Cos, Rijk Zwaan offers a solution to these problems.

Advantages

In addition to the all the good traits associated with regular cos lettuce, Open Heart Cos has a couple of significant advantages:

• Compact vein
• Open head
• Lots of long leaves of a uniform width

Especially for processing

Open Heart Cos is specially developed for fresh-cut companies. The central vein is compact rather than hollow which eliminates pinking when it is cut. The vein is also thinner, meaning that it fits better into sandwiches, and large chunks of vein no longer make their way into bagged salads.

Thanks to the open head, the lettuce is less susceptible to tipburn on its inner leaves. Furthermore, the openness of the head means that it can be cut into loose leaves in one swift movement and is also suitable for mechanical harvesting.

A single head generates numerous uniform leaves with an attractive green colour. 70-80 percent of the leaves from each head are usable, which minimises waste.

The leaves are precisely the right size and shape for fresh-cut companies: long and all the same width, resulting in uniformly cut lettuce.