by David Sax
“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.
Sometimes 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 roun
ds 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.