How Carrots Became the New Junk Food | Fast Company

How Carrots Became the New Junk Food

BY: DOUGLAS MCGRAYMarch 22, 2011

Photograph by Jeff Minton

Jeff Dunn believes he can double the $1 billion baby-carrot business — and promote healthy eating — by marketing the vegetable like Doritos. His secret weapon? He knows every snack-marketing trick in the book.

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Photograph by Jamie Chung

LATE LAST SPRING, Omid Farhang, vice president and creative director at the advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, started hearing a word around the office: “carrots.” He didn’t think much of it at first. Crispin specializes in lavish, zeitgeisty campaigns for brands such as Burger King and Old Navy. New clients are often assigned code names, to keep them a secret as long as possible. Carrots probably meant a new campaign for Nike or Frito-Lay. Then Farhang heard the brief. “I was like, Wait, carrots is carrots?” he says, laughing.

Bolthouse Farms sells nearly a billion pounds of carrots a year — the carrots Farhang kept hearing about — under a number of different brand names and supermarket labels. Only Grimmway Farms, a few minutes down the road in Bakersfield, California, sells more, just barely. Together, the two companies control more than 80% of the carrot market in the United States. As produce growers go, they are huge businesses — in Bolthouse’s case, between $600 million and $800 million a year in revenue, including premium beverages (carrot juice, of course, as well as açai, fruit smoothies, and vanilla chai) and salad dressings.

The company has been around for nearly a century now, but it boomed in the 1990s, with a breakthrough product. A local grower named Mike Yurosek had become frustrated with all the waste in the carrot business. Supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away. Yurosek wondered what would happen if he peeled the skin off the gnarly carrots, cut them into pieces, and sold them in bags. He made up a few test batches to show his buyers. One batch, cut into 1-inch bites and peeled round, he called “bunny balls.” Another batch, peeled and cut 2 inches long, looked like little baby carrots.

Bunny balls never made it. But baby carrots were a hit. They transformed the whole industry. Soon, the big growers in Bakersfield were planting fields with baby carrots in mind, sowing three times more seeds per acre, so the carrots, packed densely together, would grow long and skinny, for the maximum number of 2-inch cuts. Yields and profits climbed. The really big deal, the thing nobody expected, was that baby carrots seemed to make Americans eat more carrots. In the decade after they were introduced, carrot consumption in the United States doubled.

Then a couple of years ago, after a decade of steady growth, Bolthouse’s carrot sales went flat. Sales of baby carrots, the company’s cash carrot, actually fell, sharply, and stayed down. Nobody knew why. This was a big problem.

 

FOR JEFF DUNN, Coca-Cola was the family business. Dunn’s father spent most of his career at the company negotiating huge sponsorship deals around events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics. Just a few years out of college, Dunn followed him. Dunn eventually took over his father’s job and became one of the company’s top executives, overseeing all of Coca-Cola’s businesses in North and South America. Like his father, Dunn considered himself a marketing guy, which made sense for a top executive at a soft-drink company. “We were selling sugar water and fairy dust,” Dunn says. “And don’t forget the fairy dust.”

Three years ago, he became CEO of Bolthouse. His office is across the street from an agricultural machine yard filled with tractors, seeding trucks, and 65,000-pound harvesters. It has been something of a change. Then again, there are similarities. “Carrots are basically a duopoly,” he says. “It’s Coke and Pepsi.” And when he looked at his flagging sales, he wondered if some fairy dust might help.

Full Article below at Fast Company

How Carrots Became the New Junk Food | Fast Company.

Can America Function More Like a Fiscally Responsible Company? It’s up to Us, the Shareholders

We expect perfection from companies in Silicon Valley. The general consensus is that Yahoo is one of the worst run tech companies in the world, never mind it’s still profitable, cash-rich, and one of the largest media assets in the world. We get outraged and hit the BUBBLE! panic button when valuations of startups like Facebook, Zynga and Twitter get in the double digit billions, never mind their growth rates, user engagement and (in the case of Zynga an Facebook) actual revenues.

So how can we be so apathetic when we see true abysmal fiscal neglect, especially when it’s that of a pseudo-company in which we all essentially own shares?

That pseudo-company is the United States government and in a thorough report issued today, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has taken all emotions, politics, spin and manipulation out of the issues, to present a steely-eyed view of just how hosed our financial situation is. Spoiler alert: It’s not pretty. America is gripped by a new red menace and this time, it’s not the commies– it’s a sea of red ink. If politicians reported to voters the way management reports to shareholders, no one would finish out their terms.

If you’re a tax-paying American, you should read the report (embedded below) to see how your money is being spent. If you’re not an American, you should read it too. Far too often blogs like ours trumpet the advantages of living and starting a business in this country, of which there are many. But here’s a sober view of the downside of our wishfully innate belief that we deserve to have it all: We are in a deep financial hole, and there’s not an easy, pain-free or politically palatable way out.

But let’s leave politics aside, as Meeker and her team do, and look at some of the financials. America’s revenue has been flat for ten years. 40% of that income comes from individual tax payers. This surprised me: If you exclude Medicare and Medicaid and one-time charges, America’s profit & loss statement isn’t bad. We have had a 4% median net margin over the last 15 years.

But Medicare and Medicaid are huge exclusions, and Meeker’s report points the finger at them as the biggest culprit for why our financial situation is so untenable. Thanks largely to these unfunded entitlement programs, our cash flow is negative $1.3 trillion, or about $11,000 per household. This isn’t a George W. Bush or Barack Obama issue. Cash flow has been negative for each of the past nine years.

There are a few reasons the situations with Medicare and Medicaid are so bad. First, unlike social security and unemployment, there is no direct funding mechanism to support these programs. Second, the cost is 10x higher than was projected when Medicare and Medicaid were enacted. Why were the estimates so far off? It’s a combination of the aging population, people living longer while the retirement age has barely budged, higher-dollar expectations of care as medical advances have been achieved, and an expansion of who can receive these programs.

And there’s a bad market force at play: Private sector costs increase to help offset lower-cost public programs, which only pushes more people out of privately-funded programs and into public ones. More than 35% of the US population receives entitlement dollars or is on government payroll, up from 20% in 1966.

The report examines the cultural impact of this, asking, “Given the high correlation of rising entitlement income with declining savings, do Americans feel less compelled to save if they depend on the government for their future savings? It is interesting to note that in China the household savings rate is ~36%, per our estimates based on CEIC data, in part due to a higher degree of self-reliance – and far fewer established pension plans. In the USA, the personal savings rate (defined as savings as percent of disposable income) was 6% in 2010 and only 3% from 2000 to 2008.”

Indeed, if it weren’t for Medicare and Medicaid, the numbers show there’d be plenty of room tospend more on defense, education, law enforcement, transportation, infrastructure and energy and still break-even. Meeker notes that our global competitors– particularly countries like China and India– are investing more heavily in those areas.

There’s much more on the financials in Meeker’s report, and some recommendations of how to boost revenue long term through R&D spending and immigration reform. But the interesting thing is why she wrote it: Because for all the hand-wringing over the cost of health care and the state of our deficit, she had a hard time finding the simplest data for what America’s financial situation was.

Last year at her annual Web 2.0 Summit address, she included a slide showing America’s flat revenue, before she got into her presentation on mobile computing, and was stunned at how many people came up to her afterward to express their shock that our revenues weren’t growing. It convinced her to spend some time taking a deep look at America’s financials, and pull out all the politics and emotion to just look at the facts– something we almost never get in a world where our top news sources are Glen Beck, MSNBC and the Daily Show. As a result there’s something for every party or talking head to love and hate in the report– the true sign of balance. Meeker started the project while still at Morgan Stanley, and said in a call this morning she’s going back to her day job tomorrow. There’s no USA, Inc. Part 2 coming out, and no Al Gore-like “Inconvenient Truth” tour planned. It was a one-time project, born of her own curiosity and belief that Americans should know where their money is going.

 

Hit the link for full story Can America Function More Like a Fiscally Responsible Company? It’s up to Us, the Shareholders. Source Techcrunch

Cellphone Use Tied to Brain Changes – NYTimes.com

Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna, raising new questions about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted from cellphones.

The researchers, led by Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, urged caution in interpreting the findings because it is not known whether the changes, which were seen in brain scans, have any meaningful effect on a person’s overall health.

But the study, published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is among the first and largest to document that the weak radio-frequency signals from cellphones have the potential to alter brain activity.

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“The study is important because it documents that the human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted by cellphones,” Dr. Volkow said. “It also highlights the importance of doing studies to address the question of whether there are — or are not — long-lasting consequences of repeated stimulation, of getting exposed over five, 10 or 15 years.”

Although preliminary, the findings are certain to reignite a debate about the safety of cellphones. A few observational studies have suggested a link between heavy cellphone use and rare brain tumors, but the bulk of the available scientific evidence shows no added risk. Major medical groups have said that cellphones are safe, but some top doctors, including the former director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center and prominent neurosurgeons, have urged the use of headsets as a precaution.

Dr. Volkow said that the latest research is preliminary and does not address questions about cancer or other heath issues, but it does raise new questions about potential areas of research to better understand the health implications of increased brain activity resulting from cellphone use.

“Unfortunately this particular study does not enlighten us in terms of whether this is detrimental or if it could even be beneficial,” Dr. Volkow said. “It just tells us that even though these are weak signals, the human brain is activated by them.”

Most major medical groups, including the American Cancer Society, theNational Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration, have said the existing data on cellphones and health has been reassuring, particularly a major European study released last year by the World Health Organizationthat found no increased risk of rare brain tumors among cellphone users.

When asked to comment on the latest study, the leading industry trade group,CTIA – The Wireless Association, released a statement emphasizing recent studies that have shown no elevated cancer risk associated with cellphone use.

“The peer-reviewed scientific evidence has overwhelmingly indicated that wireless devices, within the limits established by the F.C.C., do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects,” said John Walls, vice president of public affairs for the trade group, adding that leading global health groups “all have concurred that wireless devices are not a public health risk.”

For the full Article click Below Source New York Times

Cellphone Use Tied to Brain Changes – NYTimes.com.

The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free | Magazine

A simple typo gave Michael Ivey the idea for his company. One day in the fall of 2008, Ivey’s wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet — which would have sent the note as a direct message, a private note just for Ivey — she hit p. It could have been an embarrassing snafu, but instead it sparked a brainstorm. That’s how you should pay people, Ivey publicly replied. Ivey’s friends quickly jumped into the conversation, enthusiastically endorsing the idea. Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadn’t hit on something: What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount?

Money Over Time
A brief history of 
currency technology.
—Bryan Gardiner

9000 BC: Cows
 

The rise of agriculture made commodities like cattle and grain ideal proto-currencies: Since everyone knew what a heifer or a bushel was worth, the system was more efficient than barter.

Just a decade ago, the idea of moving money that quickly and cheaply would have been ridiculous. Checks took ages to clear. Transferring money from one bank account to another could take days, as banks leisurely handed off funds, levying fees nearly every step of the way. Credit cards made it a little easier to pass money to a friend — provided that friend owned a credit card reader and didn’t mind paying a few percentage points in fees or waiting a couple of days for the payment to process.

Ivey got around that problem by using PayPal. Since 1998, PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. For the most part, its powers were confined to eBay, the online auction company that purchased PayPal in 2002. But last summer, PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Ivey immediately used it to link users’ Twitter accounts to their PayPal accounts, and his new company, Twitpay, took off. Today, the service has almost 15,000 users.

That may not sound like much, but it sends a message: Moving money, once a function managed only by the biggest companies in the world, is now a feature available to any code jockey. Ivey is just one of hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs who are attacking the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built. Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. A startup called Obopay, which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN. Amazon.com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price, cutting out middlemen, and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies’ constant nickel-and-diming. Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites. And last March, Apple gave iTunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications, making iTunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in Motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research. It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years.

But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. In November, it further opened up its code, giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay. The move could unleash a wave of innovation unlike any we’ve seen since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company’s pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose ShopSavvy program lets people find an item’s cheapest price by scanning its barcode, used PayPal to add a “quick pay” button to its app. LiveOps, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process. Previously, anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations and licensing bodies. But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business and not on touching money,” as Ivey puts it.

PayPal is just the latest company to try to harness the creative powers of the open Internet. Google created a platform that lets anyone buy or display online advertisements. Facebook allows any developer to write applications for its social network, and Apple does the same with its iTunes App Store. Amazon’s Web Services provides developers the cloud-based processing power and storage space they need to build applications and services. Now PayPal has brought this same spirit of innovation and experimentation to the world of payments. Your wallet may never be the same.

Rate of Exchange One US dollar translated into various virtual currencies.* 
Social Network     Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game     Digital Marketplace

• 10 Facebook Credits >>>
• 125-170 WOW Gold (World of Warcraft) >>>
• 80 Microsoft Points >>>
• 10 Project Entropia Dollars (Entropia Universe) >>>
• 6 Q coins (QQ.com) >>>
• 250 Linden Dollars (Second Life) >>>
• 1,500,000 Star Wars Galaxies Credits >>>
• 6 Habbo Coins (Habbo Hotel) >>>
• 10 Twollars (Twitter) >>>
• 100 Nintendo points >>>
• 1,000 IMVU credits >>>
• 80 hi5 coins >>>
• 5 Farm Cash (FarmVille) >>>
• 5.71 WildCoins (WildTangent WildGames) >>>
• 2,000 Therebucks >>>
• 100 Whyville Pearls >>>
• 25,000,000 ISK (EVE Online) >>>
• 0.75 Mahalo Dollars >>>
• 4 Zealies (Dogster) >>>
• 10 Ven (Hub Culture)

* Values are approximate. Not all currencies are pegged to the dollar, and many are not intended to be exchanged for cash.

 

Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services.
Illustration: Heads of State

The banks and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1.3 trillion in debit card transactions every year. Until recently, vendors had little choice but to participate in this system, even though — like a medieval toll road — it is long and bumpy and full of intermediaries eager to take their cut. Take the common swipe. When a retailer initiates a transaction, the store’s point-of-sale system provider — the company that leases out the industrial-gray card reader to the merchant for a monthly fee — registers the sale price and passes the information on to the store’s bank. The bank records its fee and passes on the purchase information to the credit card company. The credit card company then takes its share, authorizes all the previous fees, and sends the information to the buyer’s bank, which routes the remaining balance back to the store. All in all, it takes between 24 and 72 hours for the vendor to get any money, and along the way up to 3.5 percent of the sale has been siphoned away.

In the earliest days of credit cards, those fees paid for an important service. Until the late 1950s, each card was usually tied to a single bank or merchant, limiting its usefulness and resulting in a walletload of unique cards. But when BankAmericard — later renamed Visa — offered to split its fees with other banks, those banks began to offer Visa cards to their customers, and merchants began accepting Visa as a way to drive sales. Meanwhile, Visa and rival MasterCard — as well as distant competitors American Express and Discover — used their share of the fees to build their own global technological infrastructures, pipes that connected all the various banks and businesses to ensure speedy data transmission. For its time, it was a technologically impressive system that, for a price, brought ease and convenience to millions of buyers and sellers.

 

 

For the Full Article Click The Link Below Sourrce:Wired

 

The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free | Magazine.

Books Without Borders: A Victory For Amazon, But Also For Independent Book Stores

It’s amazing, isn’t it, the Borders bankruptcy?

Not amazing in a fun way – although the idea of a typically perky Borders employee being handed their pink slip does lend itself to mean-spirited satire: “oh, pink slip, great choice, I’ve been meaning to read that one myself – did you find everything you need today? Fantastic! Do you have a Borders reward card?”

No, it’s amazing in a “woah, how the hell did that happen?” way. It seems like only yesterday that we were cursing Borders for driving local independent bookstores out of business. And yet, this time next month, America’s streets will still be littered with thousands of independent bookstores. Borders stores? Not so much.

Explaining the global fall of Borders – their UK arm collapsed last year – isn’t quite as simple as blaming Amazon and the rise of ebooks. But it mostly is. The company took a big gamble a decade or so ago in focusing on the notion of bricks-and-mortar book shopping as an “experience”. Stores were built with coffee shops and comfy chairs and warm little nooks in which people could hang out all day and read all the book and magazines they wanted. Unfortunately, after finishing their coffee and their free reading time, many of those people subsequently went home and took advantage of Amazon’s significant discounts to actually buy books. Only those few customers who demanded instant gratification needed to actually pay full price in store.

Then, with the arrival of the Kindle, even those impatient shoppers had no need to visit Borders.

So, with Borders gone, Barnes and Noble struggling and independent stores still closing in their dozens, is this the beginning of the end for real world bookstores? Actually, I think probably not. In fact I suspect the death of Borders might actually cause something no-one in the book trade ever thought they’d see: a resurgence in independent book stores.

For a while, Borders – and the bigger (and for now more solvent) Barnes and Noble – represented a kind of mushy middle for bookselling. On one end of the spectrum sits Amazon – colossal of inventory, quick of delivery, soulless of personality. If you know exactly what book you want, Amazon is the place to buy it.

At the other end of the spectrum sit the independents – mom and pop stores and dusty used bookshops, staffed by knowledgeable bookworms eager to recommend something quirky (and possibly second hand) that they themselves have read, and think you might like. Borders plunked itself awkwardly in the middle, trying to out-stock the former (and failing) and to out-personality the latter (and failing). Even if Borders couldn’t replace the independent bookstore experience, the existence of a giant competitor in the their midst certainly hit mom and pop’s bottom line. No-one did well from the fight except for Amazon.

For the Full Story Click below Source Techcrunch

Books Without Borders: A Victory For Amazon, But Also For Independent Book Stores.

>Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price – NYTimes.com

>

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell’s workstation.)

While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain offcomputers.

Full link below
Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price – NYTimes.com

Secrets of a Mind-Gamer – NYTimes.com

>Secrets of a Mind-Gamer – NYTimes.com

The "unit effect" makes 31 days seem better than a month

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The “unit effect” makes 31 days seem better than a month

Growing Fuel: Biomass Plantations | CleanTechies Blog – CleanTechies.com

>Growing Fuel: Biomass Plantations | CleanTechies Blog – CleanTechies.com

Debate: the future of exchanges & banks – analysis review – companies – FT.com

>Debate: the future of exchanges & banks – analysis review – companies – FT.com: “Debate: the future of exchanges & banks”

A brief Synopsis From the site

Feb 17 2011 As NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse plan a merger, what does the future hold for the large trading exchanges as pressure mounts from technology, competition and regulation? and, as the big UK banks start their results season, have they made peace with the government, or are there battles ahead yet over bonuses, lending and size? In the chair analysis editor Frederick Studemann debates the issues with FT colleagues Jeremy Grant, FT Trading Room editor, John Plender, columnist and Patrick Jenkins, banking editor. (15m 41sec)