A flow shop scheduling problem involves scheduling jobs on multiple machines in series in order to optimize a given criterion. The flow time of a job is the amount of time the job spent before its completion and the stretch of the job is the ratio of its flow time to its processing time. In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) approach is proposed for minimizing the total stretch in flow shop scheduling. HGA adopts the idea of seed selection and development in order to reduce the chance of premature convergence that may cause the loss of search power. The performance of HGA is compared with that of genetic algorithms (GAs).