Baby carrots: misunderstood mini-snack
Most remain clueless about this simple and yet very influential innovation in vegetable history
Ten years ago, NPR opened a radio news segment with a few words about a man few knew. Mike Yurosek, a carrot farmer from California, had passed away earlier that year. The homage was short — it lasted no more than 30 seconds — but for many of those listening, it must have been eye-opening.
“He actually invented these things,” Stephen Miller, then an obituary writer with the New York Sun said, holding a bag of baby carrots. “Not many people know that baby carrots don’t grow this way.”
There are small carrots, which sprout from the ground and uppity restaurants serve as appetizers or alongside entrees. But those look like miniature versions of the much larger vegetable. The smooth, snacksize tubes that have come to define carrot consumption in North America are something different. They’re milled, sculpted from the rough, soiled, mangled things we call carrots, and they serve as an example, though perhaps not a terribly grave one, of how disconnected we have all become from the production of our food.
“The majority of consumers have no clue what they’re eating or how it’s produced,” said David Just, a professor of behavioural economics at Cornell who studies consumer food choices. “There are so many people who honestly believe there are baby carrot farmers out there who grow these baby carrots that pop out of the ground and are perfectly convenient and smooth.”
It’s hard to understate the ingenuity of the baby carrot, one of the simplest and yet most influential innovations in vegetable history. The little carrot sculptures (or baby cut carrots, as they’re sometimes called to clarify) not only revived a once struggling carrot industry, but they also helped both curb waste on the farm and sell the Vitamin A-filled vegetables at the supermarkets. The birth of the baby carrot In the early 1980s, the carrot business was stagnant and wasteful. Growing seasons were long, and more than half of what farmers grew was ugly and unfit for grocery shelves. But in 1986, Yurosek, itching for a way to make use of all the misshapen carrots, tried something new. Instead of tossing them, he carved them into something more palatable.
At first, Yurosek used a potato peeler, which didn’t quite work because the process was too laborious. But then he bought an industrial greenbean cutter. The machine cut the carrots into uniform 2-inch pieces, the standard baby carrot size that still persists today.
When Yurosek delivered his next batch to a local grocery chain in California, he included a bag of the new creation. He suspected he was on to something, but hardly anticipated such an enthusiastic response.
“I said, ‘I’m sending you some carrots to see what you think,’ ” Yurosek recounted in a 2004 interview with USA Today. “Next day they called and said, ‘We only want those.’ ” The carrot saviour Vons wasn’t the only one impressed. Grocers, distributors, carrot buyers, and, most importantly, some of Yurosek’s most formidable competition took notice. In the years that followed, baby carrots ballooned into big business, nudging the biggest carrot producers in the country to join in and feed the frenzy.
“When we realized this wasn’t a fad, this was real, everybody jumped on the bandwagon,” Tim McCorkle, director of sales for Bolthouse Farms, a leading carrot producer, recalled in a 1998 interview with the Chicago SunTimes.
“This idea inverted the whole carrot-growing business.”
It also helped lift the industry out of a rut. In 1987, the year after Yurosek’s discovery, carrot consumption jumped by almost 30 per cent, according to data from the USDA. By 1997, the average American was eating roughly 14 pounds of carrots per year, 117 per cent more than a decade earlier. The baby carrot doubled carrot consumption.
Today, baby carrots dominate the carrot industry. The packaged orange snacks are now responsible for almost 70 per cent of all carrot sales.