Petite peach has a small problem
Size makes tasty heirloom a hard sell for farmers
When it comes to peaches, it turns out size does matter.
This is a lesson that the Masumoto family has learned in the decade since they planted 250 Gold Dust peach trees on their farm in Del Rey, located just south of Fresno.
Masumoto Family Farm is one of the best-known farms in the state, if not the country, and is especially celebrated for its heirloom peach varieties. In 1995, third-generation owner David Mas Masumoto chronicled his attempt to revitalize the now famous Sun Crest peach in his award-winning book “Epitaph for a Peach.”
But even though the farm’s fruit is beloved and has been served by some of the country’s top-flight restaurants, from Berkeley’s Chez Panisse to New York’s Blue Hill, the family has struggled to find an audience for Gold Dust peaches.
Why is the Gold Dust such a hard sell? Apparently, it’s too small.
“In America, we are such a visual-heavy culture. We are trained to eat with our eyes; that actually reinforces shopping with your eyes as opposed to flavor. We have a bias toward large things, that bigger is better, and that trickles down to produce,” says Nikiko Masumoto, David Mas Masumoto’s daughter and a fourthgeneration farmer who works the 80-acre farm with her parents and younger brother.
The Gold Dust peach is roughly the size of a large apricot, and produce buyers are convinced that consumers don’t want to buy small peaches. To make things even trickier, the Gold Dust has an extremely short season — roughly one week around mid-June.
Yet despite the commercial challenge, the Masumotos forged ahead — because, they say, it tastes so good.
“It’s an enchanting peach,” says Nikiko Masumoto, describing its wonderful balance between sweet and tart. When eaten straight from the tree, she says, the warm, sun-kissed fruit tastes like a peach cobbler fresh from the oven. She’s right; the diminutive fruit tastes heavenly.
Over the years, the family has employed outside-the-box strategies to bring greater consumer awareness to their various heirloom fruit varieties. There is the ugly fruit program called O, U Fab! (Organic, Ugly & Fabulous!), which helps find homes for imperfect fruit, as well as a program that allows anyone to adopt and harvest a peach or nectarine tree.
The seeds for the Eat Small Fruit program were planted about six years ago, during “one of those abysmal years,” as Nikiko Masumoto puts it, when the family calculated that it would be financially smarter to pick the Gold Dust peaches and instead just let them turn to compost. They began to dream up ways to create their own market.
In 2015, Nikiko Masumoto met Pei-Ru Ko, director of Bay Area nonprofit Real Food Real Stories. Together, the pair began discussing ways to connect and engage eaters, inspiring them to not just consume but be an active part of remaking our food system.
Earlier this year, they reached out to their contacts in the food industry: Who would commit to paying $650 for roughly 250 pounds of the Gold Dust peaches? They found buyers among local chefs like Nicole Krasinski and Stuart Brioza of State Bird Provisions and the Progress, and the culinary teams at Stanford University, Airbnb and Google.
The pilot program came to full fruition this past week, when 15 volunteers, found via newsletters and social media, made the four-hour trek to the Central Valley farm to participate in an intensive crashcourse in farming that included picking the Gold Dust peaches.
However, the goal of the experimental program is more than just free labor. The hope, says Masumoto, is that the volunteers will also act as ambassadors — better connecting consumers with the farm, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, opportunities for the general public to taste the Gold Dust are slim. The kitchens at Airbnb and Google will feature them on their menus for employees. Stanford served the peaches to faculty, staff and students — going through 18 cases in an hour.
State Bird Provisions will serve the peaches with green coriander, chile powder and lime as a savory small plate; on the sweet side will be a roasted peach with a rye mochi crepe and blackberries. Next door at the Progress: a starter of peach and corn cream, plus a dessert of Prosecco rose geranium cake with macerated peaches.
Food delivery service Good Eggs also has a limited supply of the peaches ($4.99 per pound).
Masumoto and Ko have decided the program was a success and plan to do it again next year — and possibly expand.
“One of the trendiest things is to talk about farm-to-table, and I think so often we see eaters as the endpoint,” says Ko. “For me, I feel it’s so powerful when you can put eaters in the center of it, where they can be involved.”