No carving is necessary for ‘pumpkinsteins’
FILLMORE, Calif. — Like Victor Frankenstein, Tony Dighera was determined to bring a new creature to life. Though he was fairly new to farming, Dighera saw profit to be made in strangely shaped squash. So he created a “pumpkinstein.” Grown in a plastic mold, the pumpkins bear the distinctive face of the Frankenstein monster, and Dighera has harvested roughly 5,500 of them this year. With a slight smile, a wide button nose, a slightly furrowed brow and ears sticking out just slightly, the pumpkins are easy to mistake for something carved from wax.
“People never believe it’s real the first time they see it; they all want to touch it to make sure,” Dighera said, holding one of his creations on his 40-acre organic farm north of Los Angeles, as workers harvested cilantro and dill one recent morning. “The point was to make something that would get attention.”
Their distinctive, if unnatural, shape is so far a major success. Dighera sold out his crop to suppliers months ago, offering the pumpkins wholesale for $75 each. Retailers expect each to fetch $100 or more in the weeks leading up to Halloween.
Halloween has grown beyond the simple days of trick-or-treating and into a $7 billion business, according to the National Retail Federation, as retailers go to greater lengths each year to try to surpass the previous season.
Just over $2 billion was spent last year on candy alone, according to industry figures. And long ago it stopped being just a sweets-fueled holiday for children. Among the biggest money earners are adult costumes, with costs typically
ranging from $30 to well over $100. And last year, consumers spent $310 million on costumes for their pets.
Decorations now account for nearly a third of Halloween spending, and the fastgrowing category is one of the most competitive aspects of the industry.
Cue pumpkinstein and Dighera, who got his start in oddly shaped produce several years ago, after coming across a website that featured square watermelons grown in Japan.
In 2010, Dighera began experimenting with plastic molds and watermelon varieties. Was this mold too sharp, that plastic too strong, the shade too dark? If the fruits were too small, they would not take the shape, but if they were too big, they would crack. After trying dozens of seed varieties and experimenting with how much sun the crops received, he produced a sweet, crisp, red-fleshed, cube-shaped watermelon. Elated, he moved on to a heart-shaped mold.
This year, Dighera sold the square and heart-shaped watermelons for $40 each, primarily through local upscale markets. At the same time, he figured out how to use a mold to imprint logos: Whole Foods received its own branded melons, the letters perfectly pressed into the rind.
It took Dighera 27 varieties of pumpkin — and roughly $400,000 — before he found the right one to take the monster shape.
“I started playing around and realized pretty quickly this wasn’t going to be a quick thing,” he said. “But I also realized that if I could really figure it out, I would have something special.”
And something that could make a lot of money.
Dighera, 53, worked as a tractor operator for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for more than three decades, but he always harbored dreams of tilling land instead of asphalt, as his grandparents had done on their farm in San Diego. In 2003, he bought a small piece of property in Ventura County, in an area known for avocados. For more than a decade, he mostly lost money as a small organic farmer, growing kale, lettuce, berries, tomatoes and whatever else he could on the fertile ground, selling primarily to nearby organic markets.
For the past four years, though, he has pursued the creation of perfectly molded produce with a vengeance. He learned that he could shape only the first two fruits of a vine — subsequent pumpkins were too big. He worked with a local plastics company to develop a mold.
“When you try something for four years of your life, people really start to think you’re wacko,” he said.
This year, he estimates he produced 5,500 pumpkin heads. But in the coming year, he plans to turn over almost his entire farm to the endeavor, aiming to harvest between 30,000 and 40,000 pumpkinsteins. Cultivating them is easier than watermelons, Dighera said, because nobody is concerned about how a Halloween pumpkin tastes.
In the food-obsessed corners of Southern California, it is hardly unusual for a single piece of produce to cost well into the double digits. But to Andrea Moss, who has been willing to fork over $30 for foraged mushrooms, Dighera’s creations look like too much of a splurge.
“They certainly caught my eye,” Moss, 43, said as she shopped at Erewhon, an organic market in Calabasas, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb, where the pumpkins were being sold for $100 (by pre-order only). “But looking amazing won’t make me spend that much right now.”
David Johnson, a buyer for Specialty Produce, a supplier based in San Diego, said he did not think that his customers — among them some of the costliest restaurants in the region — would spring for items sold by Dighera’s farm, which is called Cinagro (“organic” spelled backward). Still, Johnson said, he understood the appeal.
“Everyone is trying to do something to get noticed in this industry, experimenting with something or another,” he said. “There are going to be people who can afford it first, and the more they grow, the cheaper it will become.”
Dighera has caught people trying to sneak onto the farm in the middle of the night four times — presumably to steal pumpkins or to try to figure out how they are grown. He has turned down offers to be bought out by major farms, he said, but is considering licensing the molds to other growers next year.
His sales pitch to retailers is simple: Even if you think the price is too steep, customers will come in just to see the oddly shaped fruits.
“Most people aren’t going to walk into a market, buy this on a whim and then decide to eat it,” Dighera said. “But when it’s an event — especially if it’s an event involving their children — people are willing to spend a lot more money.”