The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  Thornbury, Ontario, is a small, pretty town two hours northwest of Toronto, where the Beaver River flows into Georgian Bay, the giant backside of Lake Huron. The water in Georgian Bay is cold, clear, and remarkably clean, making it a coveted spot for weekend cottages and beachfront vacation homes. Just a few miles away from Thornbury are some of Ontario’s best ski hills—a bit of an oxymoron, sadly—that drop down from the top of the Niagara Escarpment to the shore of the lake. My family has had a house five minutes outside Thornbury since I was a teenager, and we spend most weekends and holidays there.

  In the summers my dad does a lot of bicycling and occasionally drags me out first thing on a Saturday morning to cycle thirty or forty miles with other baby boomers on their $9,000 carbon fiber stallions. A few years ago we left our house in the morning and rode up into the farmland beyond the vacation houses and golf courses along the shore. Within a few minutes the landscape opened up to rolling fields of canola, wheat, grazing sheep, and apple orchards. Thornbury is apple country and has been for well over a century. Lake air is held over the orchards by the heights of the nearby hills, creating a microclimate that’s temperate and ideally suited for apple growing, with plenty of moisture and good frost protection. Thick-trunked apple trees with drooping, snarled limbs are everywhere, and you can’t drive three minutes in the fall without coming across a stand selling bushels of apples or a bakery selling apple pies. There are apple vinegars and jams for sale at the supermarket and apple cider on tap in Thornbury’s bars. On the back roads, giant trucks roll by carrying presliced and packaged apples for Walmart and McDonald’s as well as tankers of apple juice destined for Tropicana.

  Five minutes into the ride that day we rode past a farm that looked completely different from all the others. Instead of knotty old trees around high grasses, there were tight, precise rows of wires affixed to wooden posts. The trees were growing vertically through these, kept in place by the wires, the same way that high-end vineyards grow their grapes. Along the fence were prominent signs aimed at drivers, so they’d know exactly what was there:

  GLOBAL FRUIT

  HOME OF THE RED PRINCE

  What the heck was a Red Prince? The sign for Global Fruit had what looked like an apple in its logo, but I’d never seen apples growing like merlot grapes. Over the course of that summer I kept driving by the home of the Red Prince, each time watching as the trees grew more lush. They definitely seemed to be apples, though I’d never heard of the variety before. When fall came I finally saw them for sale at Foodland, the local grocery store. They looked like a cross between a Red Delicious and a McIntosh, with dark blood-red skin and a round body that fit perfectly in my palm. I bit in and was met with a sharp crunch, a firm flesh that was easy to eat, and a taste that started out tangy and mellowed into a lasting sweetness. It was a hell of an apple. Where had it been all my life?

  Through the fall and winter of 2010 the Red Prince kept popping up in front of me. I regularly saw the apples at grocery stores and fruit stands near Thornbury and Red Prince apple pies coming out of the oven at the local bakery. Down in Toronto the apples were even appearing in the produce section of big supermarkets like Loblaws, the national grocery chain that frequently dictates mainstream Canadian food trends. There were even newspaper stories about the Red Prince. I’d never seen an apple—or really any produce item—arrive from obscurity and drop into the mainstream grocery world with such a presence. With a prepared product like Big Picture Farms’ caramels, a culturally driven kitchen item like cupcakes, or a chef-driven flavor trend like Ricardo Zarate’s, I understood the evolution from the tastemaker’s mind to my mouth: they began with a niche audience, built up a demand, spread news of it organically, and eventually grew that into a mainstream trend. I also saw how it worked with packaged goods, like Dole’s chia clusters, which were formulated, tested, refined, and targeted at a very specific market. Boatloads of money went into those efforts, and every aspect of those clusters, from their size to their color to the audible level of their crunch, had been taken into account with persistent market research and consultation so that they were targeted to the consumer’s ideal taste before they even hit the shelves. That was why it took companies like Dole years to bring something like chia clusters to the market; they were constantly tweaking and refining the product so that its chance of success was basically assured. But how did you do that with something as imperfect and irregular as an apple or any other agricultural product? I had seen Glenn Roberts do something like this with ancient grains, but Roberts was an eccentric exception. He relied exclusively on a network of highly influential chefs to adopt Anson Mills products, and he knew that they would remain a niche product for the gourmet eater and cook, without ever making it into the mainstream.

  What the Red Prince had me wondering was what it took to make an unknown food a recognizable trend with the general public, how you marketed an apple no one had ever heard of until consumers placed it in their grocery cart. I had heard about a similar thing being done with steak. In the 1990s, when beef prices were dropping, an organization called the Beef Innovations Group analyzed underused muscle groups and isolated more than a dozen new cuts that they then branded and marketed as new value-conscious steaks. These included the Delmonico steak, the Sierra Cut, and the Merlot steak (from the heel). Butchers and restaurants received this information and began requesting these cuts from their local meatpackers. Some actually succeeded as trends, like the Flat Iron steak, which quickly became the country’s fifth-best-selling steak, whereas others, such as the Denver Cut, have yet to really capture the public’s imagination. The Red Prince apple was something else: a nascent food trend hanging, as it were, right in front of my face, brought to life by the power of marketing.

  Marius and Irma Botden are from Sambeek, a town in the south of the Netherlands, near the German border. Marius is the second generation of his family to work in the apple business. His father owned a nursery where he grew and sold fruit trees to other growers—but not the apples themselves. After marrying in the mid-1990s, Marius and Irma opened up their own smaller nursery and began experimenting with different breeds of fruit, especially apples. The European apple market was becoming increasingly competitive and innovative at the time, and growers were looking for new varieties and breeds of apples to sell to consumers and set themselves apart from the pack. The Botdens began experimenting with different apple trees, and one day a friend who was visiting brought them a new breed that they might be interested in. It had been discovered in 1994, at the Princen Brothers Orchard, close to the town of Weert. At a section in the orchard where both Jonathan and Golden Delicious apples were being grown, a single tree was producing bright red apples. It was an accidental crossing, an unwanted bastard child of the Jonathan and Golden Delicious that had created something better than its original parents. This is a needle-in-a-haystack event in the agriculture business. As I witnessed with Glenn Roberts’s work at Anson Mills, most new plant breeds take decades of experimentation, with thousands of false starts and mistakes. The folks at Princen had a new, perfect apple dropped on them as though it were divine intervention. They named it the Red Prince.

  (There is another Jonathan-Golden Delicious hybrid that is widely distributed, a red-green, round little fruit called, appropriately enough, the Jonagold. It is often used for baking, and its origins are as American as anything you might bake an apple into. But it is not bright red, and it has never been a trend. Perhaps there is a marketing lesson here.)

  Red Prince apples are what the industry refers to as club apples because their intellectual property is protected with patents and trademarks, so only licensed growers are allowed to sell them. Most other apples, like McIntosh, are basically open-source apples: if you can get the seed, you can grow them. The Princen Brothers contracted the Botdens to grow Red Prince saplings for the Dutch market. They began selective breeding at a research station, making the Red Prince trees more resistant to disease and better at producing fruit commerciall
y. Even before the trees bore fruit, Marius and Irma saw that there was tremendous demand for the Red Prince from growers, and they wanted a larger opportunity than the nursery could provide. “You always want to do something new and exciting,” said Irma, who is slender, tanned, and wears her blonde hair short. The Red Prince was crisp yet sweet, had a bold color that drew the eye, and grew most often in the ideal size for large grocery stores like Walmart. It stored so well, you could release it months after harvest, in the winter, when your competitors would be out of apples; in fact, aging the apples in cold storage during that time actually improved their taste. “This was an apple with a long shelf life. It’s good for baking and eating out of your hands,” Irma said.

  Land in the Netherlands was prohibitively expensive to purchase a new orchard, and the Botdens were less enthusiastic about relocating their four children to developing European apple growing markets like Poland. They had friends who had moved to Canada, and they liked the country when they visited, but when they looked into the apple business there they saw a few things that really interested them. Canada had an ideal apple growing climate, especially in Ontario, with an affordable guest-worker program (Jamaicans who were brought in to work the harvest) and decent land prices. It was also ripe for innovation. After a decline of several decades Canadians were now eating more apples, but domestic production wasn’t keeping up with demand. More than half the apples eaten in Canada were now imported, and the domestically grown varieties were comparably low in quality and innovation. Few farmers were growing branded, club apples like the Europeans or, increasingly, the Americans. “If you compared Canadian apples with the US, they weren’t the greatest,” Marius said when we all spoke in the company’s small office, right off the orchard, one fall day. “Here you have a lot of big old trees, which looks nice, but the apples got smaller and smaller.” If the Botdens could hit the ground with an exclusive, unique apple grown in a novel way, they could not only do well for themselves but also fundamentally shift the way the Canadian apple business worked.

  New flavors in the apple world are a relatively recent phenomenon. Though there are tens of thousands of varieties in the world, the majority of North American supermarkets carried no more than a handful of different apples, chosen for their color, their durability in transport, and how they could sit on a shelf for a long time, but not necessarily for taste. Red Delicious, one of the first branded apples, which now has all the flavor and mouthfeel of a hand-me-down pillow, still accounts for 60 percent of the apples sold in America. That began to change in the past few decades with the introduction of branded varieties that sought to break out of the pack. From the mid-1970s onward, variety in the apple market increased dramatically, as new international breeds landed on American shores. The Australians brought the Granny Smith and Pink Lady; New Zealand introduced the Braeburn, Jazz, and Gala; and Japan flew over the Fuji. Recent entries have included the Kiku (a sweeter Fuji), the Junami (Swiss and very juicy), and, most recently, SweeTango from Minnesota, a state that also produced the Honeycrisp, possibly the biggest apple trend to hit North America since Red Delicious. Honeycrisp invigorated the apple business. Everything about it, from its pink and yellow speckled flesh to its zingy name and the earth-shattering crispness of it was an apple lover’s dream. The Honeycrisp made apples exciting again and really showed the potential for branded apples in the North American market.

  “This is the future of apples,” Irma said as she served me a slice of a deep-dish Red Prince apple crumble that she’d baked that morning: rich with cinnamon, a crunchy sugary topping, and the soft, sweet apples. “In Europe, all the produce is branded.”

  The Botdens acquired the exclusive rights to grow Red Prince apples in Canada as well as the apple’s Canadian trademark. They moved to Thornbury in 2001 and bought an eighty-eight-acre orchard with thirty-year-old trees, then tore out those trees and replanted in 2003 with less than a third the density as before (to concentrate flavor), primarily in Red Prince but also some Honeycrisp and McIntosh for diversity. Marius used the vineyard-style cultivation method he had employed in Europe and even invented his own sprayer, which was better suited for the precise rows strung along wires. Fruit trees take four years to mature enough to bear fruit, and so they waited while the Red Prince came in, selling what they had from existing trees under the Global Fruit brand to pay their bills. Though they were allowed to sell Red Prince trees to other Canadian growers as part of their agreement with the Princen brothers, the Botdens kept the rights to themselves. “We didn’t want someone to screw up the shape, size, and color,” Irma said, noting that the American holder of the Red Prince rights, a grower in Washington state (the continental capital of apple growing) couldn’t get them to grow right.

  During this time, while the Red Prince lay in wait on the trees, Irma and Marius were busy planning for its ascension to the throne of the nation’s produce department—essentially manufacturing a trend. To help them do this they turned to Virginia Zimm. A tall, gregarious woman bursting with energy, Zimm is the president of Faye Clack Communications, a produce marketing firm in Toronto that was founded by her mother in the 1970s. Faye Clack was a grade-school teacher who began working for the Ontario Apple Commission in education, then went to school at night, got a degree in public relations, and went on to dominate the male-dominated field of produce marketing in Ontario. Her nickname, a former buyer told me, was Faye Clack, Vegetable Flack. “People didn’t know how to brand commodities,” Zimm said, describing her mother’s impact on the industry. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s a pear.’ Well, the past ten years the produce category really began branding, but I dare you to name a brand in the produce aisle.” Faye Clack Communications specializes in taking fresh fruits and vegetables and making them into brands that customers ask for when they go shopping. “We understand fresh, seasonability, and perishability,” Zimm said. “It’s not like a can of soup that can sit for a month on a shelf. That apple has to sell in days. It has to move, so our campaign has to be supercharged, even if we don’t have the budget of a packaged food manufacturer.”

  Produce marketing aims to create a story about the food it’s trying to sell, because a story will stick with shoppers long enough for them to taste it—and taste is ultimately what wins. At its core is the attempt to alter the consumer’s behavior so they think differently about an apple (or a bushel of kale) in a way they never did before. When it comes to apples, this is nothing new. The common expression, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” was coined by J. T. Stinson, a Missouri apple horticulturist who was promoting apples at the 1904 World’s Fair and went on to forever associate apples and health in the eyes of consumers. “The key thing with long-term change, and not just a [sales] bump in the next six months, is to affect behavioral change,” said Terry O’Reilly, an author, radio host, and an expert on the history of advertising and marketing, who lives just south of Thornbury. “That’s the toughest task to give someone in marketing. It takes time and patience and hard work.” But when it succeeds, great food marketing can ignite trends that are difficult to extinguish. O’Reilly cites the coffee break, a previously unknown tradition that took root among Swedish immigrant housewives in Wisconsin but blossomed into a fixture of the North American workplace routine in the 1950s when coffee marketers, led by Maxwell House, popularized the ritual in advertisements to the point at which it became enshrined in union contracts and workplace culture to this day, vastly increased our coffee consumption, and made possible everything from Starbucks to Sanka.

  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.