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How Carrots Became the New Junk Food | Fast Company
How Carrots Became the New Junk Food
BY: DOUGLAS MCGRAY
Photograph by Jeff Minton
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.
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