The Tastemakers (27 page)

S
ometimes just a change in name is enough to nudge a trend forward in the commodity food world. A pear is a pear and a chicken is a chicken, but often farmers and distributors don't realize how much a bad name can be a roadblock to public acceptance. A name gives a food its identity and meaning. Before people taste it, smell it, or pick it up, they hear the name and make a quick calculation whether it sounds tasty or not. The world of produce marketing is filled with examples of this. When Canadian agricultural scientists developed a new strain of rapeseed in the 1970s that was ideal for a healthy cooking oil, they soon realized a name that immediately brought to mind sexual violence was a nonstarter in terms of marketing the new seed and its oil. So in 1978 a new name was adopted that mashed together the words
Canadian
and
oil
, canola, now the third most popular vegetable oil in the world.

Prunes had been a staple breakfast items for decades, but by the 1990s they had a major image problem. Because they were high in fiber, prunes had always been promoted as good for digestion, but as the generation that consumed them aged and the prune marketing campaign pushed the fiber angle ever more aggressively (to tap into the high-fiber diet trend), their reputation as a laxative robbed them of any appeal whatsoever. Prune juice was something my grandmother had a tiny glass of in the morning before she retired to the bathroom for half an hour. It was a product whose market share was dying along with its customers, as stagnant and immovable as the bowels it worked so hard to clear. So the California Prune Board enlisted the help of branding and marketing professionals, investing $10 million in a campaign to relaunch prunes as “dried plums,” a more straightforward description that shifted the lowly prune's image in the mind of the consumer. “Research conducted in the U.S. showed that our target audience, women ages 25 to 54, responded more favorably to the name dried plums,” notes the California
Dried Plum Board's website, alongside a photograph of US swimmer Natalie Coughlin, wet and smoldering like Cindy Crawford in her bathing suit while promoting dried plums.

Perhaps the most striking story is that of the lowly Patagonian toothfish, a snarly species that swam in the cold waters of South America. So ugly that even the Chilean fisherman who accidentally caught the fish refused to eat it, the Patagonian toothfish (also called Cod of the Deep by fishermen) was an unknown, unwanted, and unmolested species up until 1977. That was the year that a young Los Angeles seafood importer named Lee Lantz took a trip to Chile to meet with suppliers and encountered a giant Patagonian toothfish as big as one hundred pounds, lying all but unnoticed on the deck of a boat in the Valparaiso Harbor. The fish piqued his curiosity, and when Lantz began asking questions he found that the Patagonian toothfish had the characteristics he was looking for: it was white-fleshed, meaty, relatively mild, and oily enough to withstand cooking heat. Not a fish that stood up on its own, but the perfect blank canvas for chefs who wanted to add their own flavor to a seafood entrée without the fish's taste fighting back. However, as author G. Bruce Knecht recounted in his 2006 book about the fish,
Hooked
, Americans wouldn't buy something called Patagonian toothfish (who wants to eat a tooth?) or Cod of the Deep (Americans aren't cod fans). “Lantz needed to create his own name, one that would spark some sort of favorable recognition in the American market,” Knecht wrote. “ ‘Sea bass' was an obvious choice. Although it is not a particularly meaningful term—it is included in the names of more than one hundred species—it has broad resonance among American seafood eaters.” Lantz slapped
Chilean
at the front of
sea bass
to conjure up images of clean ocean waters and exotic locales (though, oddly, not the human rights violations going on at the time under the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet).

Though it took several years to catch on with the public, by the late 1990s Chilean sea bass was the darling fish of the seafood trade. Its price rose tenfold, to over $10 a pound, and I recall a time when you couldn't go to a wedding or catered event without finding it on your plate. The repositioning of Chilean sea bass was ultimately so
successful that demand for the fish outstripped the relatively small population, and the species became overfished to the point at which it was driven to the brink of extinction. Illegal fishing, high seas chases with poachers, and restaurants banning its sale became the norm, and the trend Lantz launched with his name change proved so powerful that it hastened its own demise.

“If you sit down and are meeting a stranger for lunch, or a friend, and they lean over and say ‘Lemme tell you a story,' you immediately lean in and listen,” said David Placek, the founder of Lexicon Branding. “In very simple and easy-to-understand terms, that's what's in a name. It's the beginning of a story, the introduction to it.” Placek understands the transformational power of names better than most. Since he founded Lexicon in 1982 outside San Francisco, the firm has been responsible for some of the most widely known brand names worldwide: Intel Pentium processors, Apple PowerBook computers, Blackberry phones, Subaru Outback and Forester cars, and many, many more. In the food world Lexicon coined Dasani water, Far Coast coffee, Nestlé Dibs ice cream treats, and even the clear alcoholic beverage Zima, which was a terrible idea for a boozy entry into the brief clear beverage trend that Crystal Pepsi initiated, but one with an unforgettable name.

Placek told me that naming food is the most challenging product category because, unlike a car or a computer chip, this is something you are ultimately ingesting into your body. “People are more cautious and looking for reference points to compare to something else. With the possible exception of candy bars and other sweets, you really have to make it food relevant and food acceptable,” he said. “Calling a carrot Blue Sky would make people back away. It's a more conservative field and more challenging. Our canvas is not as wide as if we were naming a computer chip. With technology: the more unfamiliar I am with it, the more I might want to take a look at it. With food, the more unfamiliar you are, the more people are likely to back away from it. Naming a food product requires more caution and a framework that says, ‘This has to go into people's mouths.' ”

According to Placek's research, successful food names whip up an instantaneous expectation of how the food will taste by
stimulating neural network associations in the brain—basically connecting the dots between memories, images, and sensations to create an idea of what that food will be like before you even see it. Lexicon recently worked with the agribusiness giant Monsanto, which had developed a hybrid seed for a very sweet honeydew melon that was more shelf stable than conventional honeydew melons. Through the company's naming process, which involves market research, consumer input, and several rounds of brainstorming sessions with Monsanto representatives, Lexicon emerged with the name Sweet Peak Honeydew. At one point a test group of consumers were brought in and given samples of the new melon. The new melon scored far better on taste when testers were told the name than when it was tasted incognito. “When we tested it with consumers, they said, ‘On a hot summer day this tasted like a cold melon and perfectly sweet,' and they're taking that from just two words: Sweet Peak.” This literal approach to the name has been used by Lexicon several times with Monsanto, including an onion that was meant to be eaten raw, called the Ever Mild. Others are more abstract, such as the company's Bellafina peppers, which are basically mini-bell peppers in vibrant colors. “We decided to be more positive and European and a little more poetic this time,” said Placek. Names easily increase a produce item's value. Placek noted that Hawaiian cane sugar, which is a commodity that tastes the exact same, in every sense, as sugar from the Philippines, will command a 25 percent premium because customers simply perceive it as better tasting.

Food trends based around a great name tend to spawn imitators, broadening the trend from one product to a whole category of them. A perfect example is the rise since the 1980s of inexpensive, drinkable wines with quirky names. One of the pioneers in this was Barefoot wines out of California. This brand broke open the notion that wine had to be named after European castles. It was fun, it was something you could have at a picnic or a party or, yes, even drink barefoot on the beach. “All major wineries and wine groups jumped on this bandwagon and said, ‘Wine is about fun and not quality, and we can sell tons of $10 wine,' ” Placek said. Soon you had chocolate cake wines, cupcake wines, and wines named after
every single species of cute animal, from dancing circus bears to naughty penguins, as though the wineries were transforming themselves into kids clothing boutiques. “What does ‘Cherry on Top' do?” asked Placek. “It stimulates associations that aren't that close to wine. It's an inefficient name … imitation is suicide. You'll never be able to catch up.”

When it came to the Red Prince, however, both the Botdens and Zimm agreed that they would keep the name intact. Zimm wasn't wild about every new apple's name. She felt the Jumami sounded too much like tsunami, but “we thought [Red Prince] worked,” recalled Zimm as we visited a banana distributor in the food terminal, where she showed me some tiny papayas. “Prince also allowed us to suggest it as a premium product.”

I asked David Placek to evaluate the effectiveness of the Red Prince name even though he hadn't had a chance to taste the apple itself. He believed it hit on the three key attributes of good names. First, it got his attention because of the way it sounded. Second, it held his attention because it conjured up an image of a prince and a color. And third, it led him to conclude that the name contained a new idea he should consider, which in this case was just how the Red Prince apple would taste. “When I hear Red Prince, my mind begins to imagine certain things about it.” Placek said. “That affects taste. I bet Red Prince would be crisp, I see sort of a smaller, very symmetrical, good-looking apple. I think it's tight, not big, and I actually have an association that this would be a very good-tasting apple. I think it's a good name.”

W
ith the Red Prince in hand, Zimm and her team set about creating a comprehensive identity for the apple that would resonate with the North American market. In many ways working with the Botdens was easier than many other produce clients launching a new fruit or vegetable. In cases like the Honeycrisp or SweeTango apples, the marketing effort was undertaken by cooperatives of growers who had bought into the license, sometimes as many as a hundred
different farmers pooling their resources together. This can slow the decision-making process and steer people toward safe, compromised choices that may not resonate as strongly with the public. But the Botdens were insistent that they were launching the Red Prince on their own. They wanted to control the trees and the quality of the growth conditions and were prepared to foot the bill for Zimm's efforts. This was no small feat. At the end of the day they estimated spending over $2.5 million on marketing the Red Prince in Canada during those first crucial seasons, an astronomical investment for what is still a small family farm. But Zimm believed she had something special on her hands. “Apples are as old as the hills,” she recalled as we finished our tour of the produce market. “The Red Prince, however, created a new product that was exciting.”

She met with the Botdens over several days that year and took them through a series of exercises to flesh out just who the Red Prince was. She used an easel, sketch paper, markers, and a whiteboard, and she encouraged Irma and Marius to shout out words they thought worked with the apple: juicy, red, sweet, crisp, tart. Next, they yelled out who the target audience would be: wholesalers, shoppers, packers, distributors, buyers, consumers. The idea was to find out who would come into contact with the Red Prince and what they would want to hear. “What resonates with them?” asked Zimm. “If I told a wholesaler ‘Red Prince is juicy and crisp,' he'd say, ‘So, how can I sell it?' I'd tell him, ‘It's a premium apple, and you can charge more for it—period.' Then I'd tell a retailer, ‘You can make more in the apple category, but we'll support it with promotions to move it off the shelf.' ” Then she worked on drafting factual proof points to back up the identity they were crafting. For instance, if Zimm said the Red Prince was good to bake in a pie, she could demonstrate through laboratory tests that the apple had a high sugar content and a firm cellular structure that could withstand heat.

Finally, Zimm conducted what she called her “creative silly brainstorming session,” a sort of free-for-all, no-holds-barred jumble of words, images, and ideas designed to tease out the real Red Prince's personality once and for all. Although the Red Prince session had taken place years before I even met Zimm, she was
conducting a similar exercise that afternoon at the Ontario Food Terminal, and after our tour we went upstairs to the spartan boardroom of Gambles. Gambles was preparing to launch their own branded line of produce, called GoFresh, which would sell fruits and vegetables directly to consumers under the GoFresh label. Over the next five hours the company's key staff would sit with Zimm and figure out just what exactly the GoFresh brand would be.