The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  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.”

  With 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.

  “Stop me if you think this is really goofy,” Zimm said as she opened up a marker and stood by an easel with a large sketchpad, “but there’s a purpose in the end!” Then she drew the Mercedes emblem and asked everyone what people saw when they encountered that symbol.

  “Luxury!” said Alanda Ferreira, who worked in sales and marketing.

  “Yes,” said Zimm, who drives a warhorse of an old Benz herself, “but that doesn’t always happen. Luxury to the dealership means higher profit. Luxury to the consumer means status.” She asked everyone to then shout out the word that they felt the GoFresh brand was about.

  “Quality!”

  “Consistency.”

  “Premium.”

  “Confidence.”

  “No waste.”

  “Expectation.”

  “Luxury!”

  “I’m thinking luxury maybe isn’t the right word,” said Jeff Hughes, the company’s president, though that spawned Zimm to suggest “premium,” which led into “homegrown,” which led Sean Balog, a young produce trader, to suggest the catch phrase “If it was any fresher, it would still be growing.”

  “Go fresh or go home!” Joseph Comella, the produce buyer at one of Gambles’s larger supermarket clients, shouted triumphantly.

  Zimm wrote down each and every suggestion, filling up sheets of paper and tearing them off just as quickly, and she then taped them around the walls of the room. “You need to stand for something,” she said during a brief break in the wordplay. “You need to take the human condition into your brand. You can say all the fancy words you want, but at the end of the day if your brand doesn’t resonate, the customer will walk on by.” She then asked everyone in the room to think about the GoFresh brand in a more human sense. “If the brand was a person, who would they be? What kind of car would they drive? Where would they take vacation, or shop?” Everyone was given a sheet of paper and asked to write down a character sketch of GoFresh, then read them out loud. Ferreira’s was the best in the bunch. She described her person, who was named Frieda Fresh, as a fashionable and trendy woman in her midthirties who drives a hybrid and is aware of new health trends but doesn’t always follow them.

  It was an important series of questions. A few years before, the growers of the milled carrots commonly referred to as baby carrots launched a $25 million rebranding campaign with a major advertising agency, which repositioned the little carrots as a young, healthy junk food. The vegetable’s personality was picked as a rebellious teenager. The packaging went from pastoral scenes to skateboarding cartoon carrots and carrots doing extreme sports. It was the carrot as the energy drink! The rock-and-roll carrot!

  For her work with the Red Prince, the existing name made matching the personality more straightforward. “What came out of that session with the Botdens was the idea
of princely behavior,” Zimm said. “The Red Prince is a gentleman. He has manners, he is polished. He lives in a grand house, drives a nice car, and he likes the nice things in life, but he’s also kind to others. In short, a real prince of a guy.” Zimm then crafted the marketing campaign around this image. Borrowing from the Red Prince’s successful 2007 launch in Germany, she hired a handsome actor dressed as a prince in a red suit with gold brocades and a collar and sash embossed with the apple’s new logo—an apple unpeeled like a corkscrew, because Irma was adamant on not using an apple with a crown, as the Europeans had done. The prince would appear at grocery stores across Toronto, handing out apple slices and performing princely acts, such as opening doors, kneeling down to kiss hands, and generally being a mensch. It was part of the apple’s splashy launch in the winter of 2010.

  One day Zimm unleashed the Red Prince’s court into the vast interconnected underground mall that links Toronto’s downtown office towers. Twenty-one young men wearing black suits with red ties, silk kerchiefs, and bowler hats handed out Red Prince apples in individually wrapped golden mesh bags, which were piled on silver platters. Members of the media were sent elaborate boxes that opened to reveal a Red Prince apple on a red silk pillow. The Red Prince had its own Facebook page and a Twitter account (@RedPrinceApple) with nearly a thousand followers that Irma and Marius constantly updated with photos from the orchard. Thanks to these stunts, the apple generated tremendous press across Canada, with articles in newspapers, business magazines, and food blogs heralding the arrival of what some were calling the next Honeycrisp. The campaign put the Red Prince on the map for the first time in North America, and the Botdens began collecting buyers: Kroger supermarkets in the United States and Loblaws in Canada, Walmart in both countries, and scores of independents—around two thousand stores in all. The groundwork was laid for the Red Prince to become the next great trend in apples.

  The Red Prince continued its slow but steady growth through 2011 and 2012, but that winter, shortly after the previous year’s apples went to the market, disaster struck. After a cold and snowy February, March brought with it an unprecedented heat wave that lasted close to two weeks, with temperatures rising into the seventies. I was up in Thornbury during one of those weekends. On Saturday morning I went skiing on the rapidly melting hill in a sweatshirt, then came back to the house and walked my dog on the beach in shorts as ice floated in the bay. Climate change had hit hard, causing the buds on the apple trees to blossom two months early. Unfortunately, it was still winter, and when freezing temperatures returned a few weeks later most of the apple buds died. By the time of that fall’s harvest, the Botdens were only able to salvage a small portion of their Red Prince crop, and these apples were so small and damaged that they were either sliced and packaged generically or crushed into juice. The season’s work was a total wash, and any momentum the Red Prince campaign had gathered toward a trend was now derailed.

  “It’s March,” Zimm said as we sat in the market in 2013, “and we should be going crazy on the Red Prince, but they don’t have any apples. That’s agriculture. There’s nothing you can do. Mother nature can be a real bitch.”

  The Red Prince’s setback was a reminder that agricultural food trends, whether Red Prince apples or Anson Mills China Black rice, are tenuous, long-term projects. Growers, distributors, and produce marketers may want to hook onto trends in the culinary world, but it takes years, if not decades to perfect a plant’s breeding, establish a secure and diversified supply network, and have the distribution in place to guarantee it a spot in the market. If a factory making M&Ms burns down, it’s likely that the supply of the candy will be only temporarily affected, as setting up a new production line is simply a matter of money. But if a crop is wiped out by weather, disease, or bad genetics, its recovery takes years. Karen Caplan at Frieda’s told me about a product called kale sprouts that shot for a trend before it was mature enough. Both the vegetable kale and brussels sprouts had been trending with chefs and home cooks in the past few years, thanks to dishes that paired them with bacon as well as kale’s long, sturdy shelf life and its spot as a darling of urban farmer’s markets. Then an American grower had found a seed in Europe that combined the two vegetables into a single plant. He paid tens of thousands of dollars for the seed, and when some distributors got wind of it, they began spreading the news on social media, sending samples to select chefs and driving up demand among foodies. In early 2013 popular recipe blogger Dorothy Reinhold called kale sprouts “the newest, coolest green veggie to hit the produce section since that kooky looking Romanesco showed up and made us all wish we spent more time studying fractals.” But there was a problem: the grower had been so busy increasing supply to meet hot demand that they hadn’t had the chance to breed the vegetables sufficiently to survive long-distance transport. “By the time they got to the warehouse, the plants had turned yellow,” said Caplan. “Kale sprouts had this huge spike and enormous drop off. They’re not going to be mainstream for a very, very long time, even though brussels sprouts and kale are both still trending. The grower has to perfect mother nature.”

  The reality, said Caplan, was that produce trends still grow gradually, over the course of ten or more years, only arriving with a marketing push once they are ready. Frieda counseled her company’s clients to grow slowly, establishing a sturdy supply and good breeding, allowing trends to emerge organically. In 2012 the company launched a campaign to introduce the Stokes purple sweet potato, which was a sweet potato that was purple in color. To the public’s eye it appeared out of nowhere, but Caplan noted that its success was a convergence of several different trends, from the growing interest in colored vegetables to a Vitamin A health trend to the rising popularity of sweet potato French fries in North American chain restaurants. “We show up with purple sweet potatoes a year ago, and it looks like we’re on trend,” said Caplan. “But we did a tremendous amount of research to realize that this would be an easier product to introduce than any before.”

  Back in Thornbury, the Botdens weren’t too worried. I visited them again in the summer of 2013, and things were looking up. A long, cold winter followed by a wet spring and hot summer was doing great things for the crop. Irma took me into the orchard and showed me the Red Prince apples growing in little clusters on the trees. Each was the size of a plum at this point, but they would soon grow as big as a fist before their September harvest. The family had planted more acres of Red Prince trees, and despite missing the market the previous year, demand for the apples had somehow increased from major Canadian supermarkets like Loblaws. “I still love the brand,” Irma said, holding an apple in her hand. “It looks fresh and new and strong and bold.” A decade after planting the first Red Prince trees in North America, she predicted this would be the first year that the apple would finally deliver them a profit.

  In the large cafeteria of Hurley Medical Center, a trauma hospital in the battered, boarded-up downtown of Flint, Michigan, Dr. Rao Mushtaq, a pediatric resident from Pakistan, walked up to the steam trays at the Café Spice kiosk, took a spoon, and flicked two grains of rice pulao into his mouth. He chewed for thirty seconds, walked around to the vegetarian side of the counter, and repeated the taste test with another batch. After careful deliberation and a dramatic shake of his head, Dr. Mushtaq filled his plate with a pool of mint chutney, took two warm naan breads, and joined a table with his colleagues—other doctors from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal—who had all been eating curries, biriyanis, and other Indian staples from the Café Spice kiosk every single day for lunch and dinner since it had opened here in 2011.

  “We were eating a lot of mac ’n’ cheese before,” groaned Dr. Mushtaq.

  “My first year here, my cholesterol shot up dangerously high,” echoed Dr. Vishwas Vaniqwala, an Indian-born pediatrician. “Honestly, I used to skip lunches because I was sick of eating salads and sandwiches and chips.”

  The South Asian doctors who made up the vast majority of residents at Hurley eventually
demanded more familiar food from Steve Dunn, the cafeteria’s executive chef, who works for the national catering company Sodexo. Dunn had never even tasted Indian food, but he consulted online recipes and made samosas, saag paneer, and chickpea masala from scratch one day. The food sold out in minutes. “I couldn’t do it every day,” Dunn said, despite the doctors’ enthusiastic response. “I mean, it takes a hell of a lot of time and knowledge. You’ve gotta know the keys and tricks to Indian cooking. It took my staff three weeks to learn how to make basmati rice because they were used to Uncle Ben’s. You’ve got to soak it, rinse it, add butter and spices, and cook it in a certain way.”

  Instead, Dunn turned to Café Spice, America’s largest Indian foodservice company, which had recently launched a branded partnership with Sodexo and received their turnkey solution. Each month he orders palettes of premade, frozen Indian dishes that his staff simply thaws, heats, and serves in a kiosk designed and installed by Café Spice. Dunn took me back into the hospital’s massive kitchen, where one of his young cooks, Chris Espinoza, was loading up a steam oven with frozen containers of chicken tikka masala, saag paneer, and bhindi masala. “I tried it once,” Espinoza admitted as he switched out the frozen food for freshly heated containers of the same dishes and poured them into serving trays, “but I’m not into the spicy stuff. I like what I like.”

  So far the bulk of the customers at the Café Spice kiosk, which was next to stations that served sandwiches, burgers, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, pizzas, and salads, had been the South Asian doctors, but Dunn had noticed a growing interest in the Indian food from other hospital staff, and the food was only available at two other places in Flint. At lunch Dunn introduced me to Tracy Daviek, a nurse who had never tasted Indian food until Café Spice opened in the hospital. “I tried it on the first day when they were giving out samples,” she said, dipping a piece of naan bread into a steaming mound of bhindi okra masala, a tomato-based okra stew. “I love to eat it. My favorite is the chicken …” she turned to Dunn, “you know, the one in the red sauce …”