Company Profile

PanAmerican Seed Co. – one of the world's leading breeders and producers of F1 and open-pollinated flower seed – markets its products to both wholesale and retail distributors around the globe. Always pushing beyond the expected with its state-of-the-art products, a few of the company's most recent innovations include Ride The Wave petunias, Matrix pansies, SuperSeed impatiens, and the Fantastic Foliage and Fantastic Flowers brands of premium seed-grown varieties. The company's innovative Yield Potential program has consistently delivered the highest seed quality for the best young plant (plug) production since 1995. This highly reliable production planning tool was developed to give professional growers an accurate prediction of usable seedlings on their benches.

Much of the world's seed supply for many important bedding, cut flower and potted plant crops is produced at several PanAmerican Seed sites, each selected for their optimal climates. F1 hybrid crops like impatiens, pansies and many others are pollinated, harvested and prepared for distribution at Linda Vista in Costa Rica and Semillas PanAmerican Chile in Chile. High-quality, field-produced crops including marigolds, gazanias and verbena are bred, trialed and produced by teams in California and Mexico. Floricultura in Guatemala also produces seed for commercial growers worldwide.

PanAmerican Seed originated from two different parent lines. The first started with George J. Ball, who used great care in selecting the varieties his company offered to growers. As the Ball breeding team grew, a plant breeding station was started in Santa Paula, California in 1952, and developed such notables for the Ball company as Pink Magic petunia, Promenade snapdragons and Ball asters.

The second line began in 1946 when Charlie Weddle, Claude Hope and W.D. Holley partnered to form a breeding and production organization called PanAmerican Seed Company in Paonia, Colorado. The trio concentrated initial breeding efforts on developing double petunias from seed to replace the Japanese strains cut off by World War II. During the same period, Hope was building Linda Vista, S.A. in Costa Rica as a production source for the company's crops. PanAmerican Seed was soon recognized as the undisputed leader in hybrid petunia and snapdragon breeding and production.

The modern PanAmerican Seed Co. was born in 1963, when the Colorado-based company created by Weddle, Hope and Holley was purchased by the Ball corporation. Both sides brought a wide array of F1 hybrid varieties plus a lineup of distinguished breeders to the team. PanAmerican Seed continued to develop in Colorado until a move in 1968 to Bradenton, Florida, a location that allowed breeders to do a more thorough job of screening material in the field for disease resistance, heat tolerance, short-day flowering and more.

After the purchase of PanAmerican Seed by Ball, Claude Hope continued as an independent breeder of F1 impatiens and coleus at his Linda Vista farm. Hope and his team were busy developing hybrid varieties like Carefree coleus and Elfin impatiens, the forerunner to today's best-selling Super Elfin series. On the production side, Linda Vista was the primary contractor for PanAmerican Seed, along with locations in India, Italy, Israel, Baja and the US. Linda Vista was sold to the Ball corporation in 1981, and flourishes today as a major production site for the company. Hope continued as president of Linda Vista until his retirement in 1989, and then served in an advisory capacity until his death in 2000. A second PanAmerican Seed breeding station in Elburn, Illinois was added in 1985, with impatiens and petunias as the main crops.