It might be a dream shared by airline passengers, school principals, and nervous parents, but for Soheila Maleki, it is a mission.

A researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Maleki has spent the past five years in a New Orleans laboratory testing peanut proteins in an attempt to breed an elusive prototype: the world’s first hypoallergenic peanut.

Using the process illustrated here, Maleki has screened more than 800 varieties of the legume in search of mutated strains that lack the nine basic proteins responsible for allergic reactions. Her biggest success so far has been creating a peanut that’s missing parts of two of the proteins, Arah2 and Arah3. She is now crossbreeding that peanut with others in an effort to create another hybrid.

Around the country, as many as 60 other scientists are also scrambling to build a better, or at least not so allergenic, peanut. Why the rush? Sales in the $1 billion industry have remained stable in spite of an increase in peanut allergies. (About 3 million Americans have nut allergies, twice as many as in 1997, according to a report by one allergy foundation.) But food manufacturers see a way to pump up their bottom line by selling customers products that are guaranteed to be peanut-free. Mars, for example, has already changed factory lines to separate almost all stages of the production of peanut and plain M&M’s, and it built a nut-free plant in Canada to make nutless Mars Bars.

Of course, even after a safer peanut is invented—probably a decade from now—how it will perform remains a question. “It could germinate poorly,” worries crop scientist Thomas Isleib. Or worse, he says, “it could taste different.”