The Invention of the Baby Carrot | Hacker News Reader

The Invention of the Baby Carrot

priceonomics.com

If you go to farmers' markets, sometimes there's the option to buy 'rejects' - ugly produce - at a significantly reduced cost.

It would be cool to see something similar in supermarkets, since the waste of tons of food is atrocious on its own merits, and reducing that waste while introducing a cheaper alternative might make produce more affordable all around.

There are places like that... Near me there is a decent sized Persian population and there are some Persian owned markets that get the non "top" quality produce and sell it for a steal. (Top in quotes because it's still usually high quality just not "perfect" looking) I find it hard to buy produce anywhere else.

Intermarché in France did just that: https://vimeo.com/98441820

Food is so subsidized that we may as well throw out any food that consumers dont want, the tax payer will eat the cost (but not the food).

Not all produce is subsidised.

Canada's largest supermarket chain recently started doing this: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/loblaws-sel...

So did French supermarket Intermarché and Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn. It's encouraging to see that bigger chains are starting to do this. Throwing away perfectly good food just because it doesn't look 'perfect' is pretty ridiculous.

Do they really throw that stuff away? You can make juice and the like with it; no-one would ever know what it looked like.

I can tell you right now that 100% of my friends are thrifty enough that they would exclusively buy "reject" produce even at only a marginal discount. By the time you're done preparing the vegetables for the meal you can't even tell what it looked like originally anyway.

All you need to do is ensure that people are aware that the edibility is the same (which, if sold by reputable supermarkets, will be taken as a given) and give them accurate guides on discerning the ripeness of such produce (assuming that our usual standards of ripeness are based on color, or other traits that rejects might not fulfill).

There's a fortune to be made here. Market it to broke post-college grads, counterculture hipsters, and earth-loving hippies. Hint hint, entrepreneurs.

They're also often called "visually distressed".

The well known version of this is "Ugly Fruits". http://www.frutafeia.pt/en http://www.uglyfruits.eu/

Here's a BBC Radio Four programme that talks about Ugly Fruits and two other "food waste" initiatives. (Zimbabwean orphans growing mushrooms in food waste - raising their status from social outcasts to useful members of society with produce to trade; and John Greany Sørensen who vacuum dries pulps to make crystals from food.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05mpx0k

Woolworths in Australia started doing this recently. Though, to be honest the stuff they're selling looks just like the regular ones.

Ugly or not, peeling janky-shaped potatoes sucks.

Agreed, but offer odd shaped potatoes at 20% less and let people decide the value of their potato peeling time.

Just choose a preparation that uses the peel.

Carrots might be "the lucky ugly vegetable" because they can be shaped this way. Other vegetables aren't so lucky.

For those, there are actually campaigns that encourage people to buy ugly produce[1].

1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/12/09/369613561/in-eur...

As a European it's always amazed me how same-looking all produce is in American supermarkets. That was a huge culture shock.

I mean I'm sure we do plenty of selection here, but the lengths to which you go in the US truly astounded me.

But now I miss baby carrots whenever I'm back home. They really are a magnificent snack to nibble on. Just the perfect amount of fresh and crunchy.

Your comment has that weird Euro-omniscient voice I usually see on Reddit.

I'm Norwegian, have lived all over the world, and currently live in Prague. Produce has looked the exact same to me everywhere from Whole Foods to Walmart to Lidl to Tesco to the small corner market down the street.

I think one problem is that we have become disconnected from the food production. If a fruit looks different from what we are used to, we don't know if that means it will taste bad, or even dangerous to eat.

I think stronger brands could be a solution, because then we can outsource our decision making to someone knowledgeable, and have someone to blame if the product was bad.

Or people could develop the necessary skills to judge non-uniform produce? (They used to have them, after all. It's not magic.)

There's a company aiming to do the same thing with apples: http://www.arcticapples.com/

They genetically engineered the apple so it doesn't go brown, and just received permission to start selling them. Once the apple trees grow they'll be able to sell sliced apples as snacks.

This is crazier than this article!

The baby carrot is a bacteria nightmare, as are sliced apples. Removing the skin that early is inimical to your stomach's pro-bacterial flora and bad to the entire digestive tract - even if you can disguise the decay with a spray which causes apples not to brown, or with water to make carrots seem not spoiled. However, they both become slimy much more quickly, a telltale sign. That decay/bacteria is present from nearly the moment you shave/slice it. The stomach is the body's largest organ - many consider it the "second brain". Inimical for health to seed the stomach's flora with the bad bacteria of shaved/sliced produce.

My parents would never buy chocolate milk, they said that the inferior tasting milk was diverted to the chocolate line, as the chocolate would mask it.

This is probably true. An ex-coworker that worked in a chip factory in high school used to say, "Don't eat the BBQ flavor chips!"

As they say, you eat with your eyes and nose first before eating with your mouth.

This is an example of an amazingly good hack, which led to the creation of a whole new market and also reduce a lot of criminal waste. Smart.

What an awesome quote and customer validation;

  "I said, 'I'm sending you some carrots to see what you
  think.' Next day they called and said, 'We only want
  those.'"

Also this tail quote from the inventor of the baby carrot;

  'When you've done something you're proud of and it's
  been acknowledged, it's a dream come true.'"

Kudos to the carrot hacker of our times. Now I'm feeling hungry for some orange crunchy.

Honestly I've known about the story of the baby carrot and the whole "ugly" produce being unacceptable. But it also seems to apply to food packaging as well. I have seen countless shoppers (myself included at times) avoid a box of say something like cereal that may have been dropped and the outer cardboard box dented or damaged in some way. Now I know it's highly unlikely that the actual product has been damaged (for something like cereal at least), but why do we do this? I feel 99% certain the product isn't damaged in any way but I always want to avoid the damaged box and go for the non-damaged box. Where did this "pretty" produce, "pretty" boxes, etc mentality originate?

You have two identical products, with the same price, next to each other on the same shelf. The box is damaged for one of them - it's the natural choice to choose the one that's not damaged in any way.

Now, if the damaged one is a little bit cheaper, you'll probably have a greater chance of accepting the product with cosmetic damage over the more expensive, "perfect" product.

I was just thinking -- if there was a way to somehow be able to offer instantaneous discounts on "damaged" products, supermarkets could probably avoid throwing away a lot of "damaged" goods.

But then I realized people would just start damaging them themselves, in order to get the discount.

I've seen a lot of supermarkets doing just that. They simply place a sticker with new price to avoid the problem you described.

There's something psychological about a product being in its clean and pure undamaged state. And it goes well beyond fruit.

Even for products that get wear and tear through normal usage, it's somehow better if we're the ones who do that wear and tear.

Eg, say you're at a book shop buying a paperback. If there are multiple copies you'll choose the one with the crispest cover and cleanest pages. Even though it'll get bent up and dirtied as you read it yourself anyway.

Given two identical products for the same price with different levels of wear, it's only sensible to chose the less-worn item. It will almost certainly last longer for the same money.

Similarly, appliance stores will sell you a refrigerator at half price if some of the paint got scraped off on one side in transit.

Sometimes that instinct serves us well, though. My understanding is that dented cans really can be dangerous: if the dent includes any level of break in the can's airtight seal (even something too small to see) then you're at risk for serious food poisoning.

And even apart from illness, a badly dented box of (e.g.) corn flakes might well contain more than the usual amount of cereal crushed into dust. Rough handling can impact the quality of a lot of foods.

So I don't want to cheer for waste, but I don't think it's fair to write off this heuristic as completely irrational, either.

I didn't know the actual story, but I've long assumed that baby carrots were made from cosmetically blemished carrots. Just like I figure fruit juice comes from the less than perfect fruits.

Actual news to me. But I should have just thought about it a bit more.

Kinda makes me sad that we're so driven by emotion, even to the point where it's against our own best interests.

Then again:

'When you've done something you're proud of and it's been acknowledged, it's a dream come true.'

Ooof, right the feels.

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