The Tastemakers (26 page)

If anyone excels at produce marketing today in the United States it is Frieda's, a specialty fruit and vegetable distributor based in Southern California. In the late 1950s Frieda Caplan, fresh out of UCLA and looking for a job, went to work for relatives in the wholesale produce market of Los Angeles. Like Faye Clack in Toronto, Caplan was the lone woman in the gruff, male-dominated market, and she stuck out like a sore thumb in the best way possible. “My mom was naturally a promoter and very friendly,” said her daughter Karen Caplan, who is now the company's CEO. In those days farmers didn't put a lot of thought into marketing their produce. They would grow something on their land, then suddenly realize just before they picked it that they needed to figure out how to sell it. So the farmers would load up their trucks and drive down from the Central Valley to the Los Angeles produce market, where they would walk door to door with samples of their eggplant or strawberry, begging the distributors to sell what they were offering. If it was something new, the conservative buyers would basically brush them off. “All the old guys would say, ‘I'm too busy selling lettuce and onions,' ” said Karen. “ ‘But if you walk down there to the end of the market, there's a woman named Frieda. She'll talk to anyone.' ”

And talk Frieda did, lending an open ear to every farmer, importer, and dreamer who arrived at her door with boxes of strange-looking fruits and vegetables with unknown names and no presence whatsoever in the market. Her first success in 1960, back when she was still working for her cousins, were brown mushrooms. At the time North Americans bought white button mushrooms—clean, easy, white mushrooms, whole or sliced. Brown mushrooms, now that was something nobody wanted. They looked like dirt. Were they even safe to eat? Frieda took a chance and not only launched the brown mushroom into the mainstream of our food culture but also spawned a trend for eating a whole portfolio of mushrooms, from meaty portobellos to delicate shitakes, that continues to grow today. According to the USDA, national brown mushroom sales in 2012 were $212 million, up from just $168 million two years prior. Thank Frieda Caplan for that.

Two years later Frieda encountered the fruit that would launch her own business and put her on the map as an important tastemaker, especially where produce is concerned. A shopper at a Safeway supermarket in Salt Lake City had approached the store's produce manager with a request. He had just come back from a mission with the Mormon Church in New Zealand, where he had eaten a delicious fruit called a Chinese gooseberry. The fruit had originated in southern China, where it had been called by a variety of names, including the Gooseberry, Sunny Peach, Macaque Peach, Wonder Fruit, and, in a bit of decidedly un-Western branding, the Hairy Bush fruit. In the late 1930s it was introduced to New Zealand and cultivated with great success, at one point under the name Melonette, which is where the hungry missionary had encountered it. The produce manager had never heard of a Chinese gooseberry, but he promised to look into it and called his wholesale buyer at the market in Los Angeles to see whether he could track one down. The buyer walked around the market, asking about this strange, unknown fruit, and all the men there, busy with their onions and stacks of iceberg lettuce, pointed him in Frieda's direction. She said she'd never heard of one but would keep her eye out. A couple of weeks later a fruit broker appeared at her door with a Telex from exporters in New Zealand, inquiring whether anyone would be interested in bringing a fruit called the Chinese gooseberry to America.

“It's all based on luck and destiny, our business,” said Karen, retelling the story that was now a core part of the family legend. “Mom says, ‘Oh my god … I'll take them all. I already have my first customer.' Remember that these things were brown, fuzzy, hard as a rock, and no one knows what they are. But my mother finds out they have a great shelf life. It takes her six months to sell 250 boxes. She sends all the profits back to New Zealand and sends them to the growers with specific instructions: work on its name.” The name the growers came up with, based on the similarity between the Chinese gooseberry and the shape of New Zealand's small national bird, was the kiwi.

That was the beginning of the kiwi trend, though it would not reach critical mass for close to two decades. Before the kiwi came
into your house, before it was the go- to garnish on breakfast buffets and a punch line for jokes about 1980s nouvelle cuisine, the kiwi was an unknown fruit in Frieda Caplan's warehouse that no one even knew they didn't want. To sell kiwis, Frieda had to first make them known and then make them desirable, and she did this through a long campaign. “I call it gradually, then suddenly,” says Karen, borrowing Ernest Hemmingway's proverb on bankruptcy. “It's the same thing that happens with cupcakes.” First, she secured a supply for the kiwis, helping growers perfect their yield and quality as well as contracting farmers to grow them the other half of the year in California, so the demand would never be without a source. Then, she began sampling kiwis. Frieda went to restaurants and had them make French-style fruit tarts topped with sliced kiwis so she could hand out pieces to prospective buyers and immediately show its dazzling green color, bright taste, and potential uses. The kiwi could be eaten cut up, diced into cocktails, sliced as a garnish, or layered atop pastry. Each use represented different markets, from grocery stores to bakeries and restaurant service contractors. Then Frieda got the kiwi into the hands of food editors at newspapers and magazines in the hope of generating press and some level of public awareness. The more people heard about kiwis, the more likely they were to request them from their grocers, who would invariably find Frieda and place an order. But it took time, and it wasn't until the early 1980s, when tastemaking California chefs such as Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters began integrating kiwis into desserts and salads as garnishes, that the trend really took off. “You had a chef featuring our product, and food writers wrote about it. It kinda gradually then suddenly became a trend,” Karen said for the second time. “It's our eighteen-year success story.”

Since that fateful encounter with kiwis Frieda's has introduced over two hundred new fruits and vegetables to the American market and, in many cases, the Western world. Many of them are as unfamiliar today as the day Frieda's acquired a sample. Ever heard of kiwanos, oroblancos, or Buddha's hands? Me neither. But I can't tell you how many times I have eaten passionfruit, sugar snap peas, pink grapefruits, pine nuts, hothouse cucumbers, sweet onions, and
habanero chilies without realizing who made those trends possible. Karen told me that despite advances in agriculture, technology, and the food distribution business, the process of creating a produce trend is no different today from what it was when her mother brought in that first shipment of kiwis. First, they'll work with farmers to improve a fruit's or vegetable's flavor profile and shelf life, a process that takes several years, at the least. Once it's ideal, they'll sample it to customers and secure enough orders to justify a larger farming investment. With sales secured, Frieda's will go out and find more growers to cultivate the product so a consistent supply can be assured, because product shortages will stop a trend dead in its tracks. Then Frieda's will work to create more public demand to absorb the increased supply. They will reach out to the public through tastemakers like bloggers, food writers, celebrity chefs, influential restaurateurs, and even media personalities, such as Dr. Oz.

This is essentially the same process Faye Clack Communications uses with its own clients in Ontario, though their focus is on creating a brand rather than distribution, which other companies handle. Virginia Zimm's mission, like the folks at Frieda's, is to take an edible piece of nature and create a promise out of it, communicate that promise to the public, and then deliver on it with taste. A Honeycrisp is a perfect example of a branded fruit that delivers on its promise. It is a crisp apple that tastes sweet as honey, but without the name and the marketing behind it, it would just be one more apple in a pile at the supermarket. “If it's on the shelf and no one knows, they'll just walk on by,” said Zimm.

On a cold morning in March I joined Zimm at the Ontario Food Terminal, a large, guarded complex of battered concrete parking lots, low-slung buildings, and loading docks just west of the city. Zimm and I had spoken before about produce branding, but I wanted to see how it played out on the floor of the wholesale market, which is the third-largest produce distribution center in North America, after Los Angeles and Chicago, and moves over five million tons of produce daily to customers in Toronto and surrounding communities. We walked around the U-shaped inner courtyard, where buyers backed graffiti-covered delivery trucks up to the docks
belonging to each of the twenty-one “houses,” which is what they call the different distributors that operate out of the terminal. Men in motorized loading carts stacked high with crates of fruits and vegetables zipped by in a constant stream, each dangling a lit cigarette out of their mouths, dodging each other by mere inches. On the loading docks everyone from uniformed logistics coordinators from national supermarket chains to elderly Chinese corner store owners with hand-drawn carts were filling their orders, to be shipped out and stocked in produce sections for shoppers to purchase.

Inside the windowed walls crates of pristine fruits and vegetables of every shape, color, and flavor were displayed in immaculate climate-controlled warehouses staffed by men in white butcher's coats and monogrammed T-shirts. There were skyscrapers of Valencia oranges, giant hills of russet potatoes, and crates of flawless figs lined up in precise formation like delicate purple soldiers. Zimm, much like her mother and Frieda Caplan back in the day, was still the only woman on the ground, but she knew all the men here and addressed them by their first name. At one house she grabbed a bag of red bird's eye chili peppers right from its crate, tore it open, and began eating the little red firecrackers like grapes. “These are my vice,” she said, waving to the house's owner, who was suspended in an office above his warehouse. He saw her, acknowledged the peppers she had taken, and waved back nonplussed.

Inside another one of the houses Zimm stooped down to the floor and picked up a large artichoke with a purplish tinge to it from a box that said Ocean Mist. “This is probably the best artichoke in the world, which is interesting because it's not a native vegetable to California,” where Ocean Mist artichokes, which dominate the North American artichoke market, are grown. Still, said Zimm, “no one in the grocery store will know this artichoke is Ocean Mist.” It will just be an artichoke in a big anonymous pile, with a price per pound and the words
Product of USA
. Zimm wanted to approach Ocean Mist and propose a campaign that would bring their brand to life for consumers, increasing their value significantly. “If it were branded, this product [really, any product] would fetch a thirty to one hundred percent premium” at the cash register. Anything can
be branded, Zimm said, even something as straightforward and commonplace as romaine lettuce, as she picked up a bag containing three Andy Boy romaine hearts, trimmed of their wilted outer leaves and sealed in a brightly labeled package with pink trim. I've bought Andy Boy–brand romaine hearts many times, despite knowing that it's nearly twice the price of a head of romaine lettuce, with no discernible difference in taste. But there's a value added in the packaging, said Zimm, picking up a loose head of Peter Rabbit romaine. “By the time this gets to the store, because it's not packaged, the leaves will wilt or tear, and they'll end up trimming and tossing away a lot of them.”

The Gambles house was the market's largest distributor, a cavernous, windowless, refrigerated warehouse the size of a city block. Inside Zimm showed me an example of a branding campaign that had turned into a trend. She walked over to a box and picked up a Vidalia onion, the sweet, large, saucer-shaped onions from Vidalia, Georgia, that she had marketed in Canada for twelve years to the point at which Vidalias became so well known that there was no need to promote them further. In 1986 Georgia's state legislature had trademarked the Vidalia onion name, treating it like a European appellation for wine or cheese (e.g., Champagne is a sparkling wine only from the Champagne region), preventing others from co-opting their hard-earned brand and diluting it with a cheaper sweet onion that had a different flavor profile. The Vidalia Onion Committee, an umbrella organization of roughly a hundred Vidalia farmers who controlled the brand, engaged in various marketing exercises over the years to cement the onion's growing trend with customers. One of the most recent enlisted the services of animated green ogre Shrek (no shy lover of onions) to promote Vidalias to kids shopping in supermarkets with their parents. It may seem like an odd match between product and marketing strategy—we are accustomed to seeing cartoon characters associated with sugary, brightly colored cereals, not pungent vegetables—but the campaign caused Vidalia sales to shoot up by as much as 50 percent, according to the growers. That's the power of marketing on trends; it can even make stars out of ordinary onions.

As for Red Prince apples, Virginia Zimm had a running start—her product had a great name.