Exotic Goodies Produce Big Payoff for L.A. Company

Frieda Caplan will make $13 million this year teaching American shoppers to say goodby to meat and potatoes and hello to tofu and kiwi fruit.

She credits her import-export company with single-handedly introducing New Zealand’s small, furry brown kiwi fruits to grocery stores and consumers in the United States, not to mention egg-roll skins, California squash, Japanese mushrooms, jicama, bean sprouts, cherimoya fruits and shallots.

Although Frieda Finest Produce Specialties sounds like a business that caters to snobs, trend-setters and gourmet cooks, Caplan said nothing could be further from the truth.

“We are targeting the general public,” said Caplan, who is 62 and runs her 50-employee company in Los Angeles with the help of her two daughters.

“The gourmet cook doesn’t need me,” she said. “We’re not trying to sell ginger to the Chinese or shallots to French people. Those people already know about it.”

Caplan sells as many as 500 varieties of fruits, vegetables and prepared foods like egg-roll skins, bean curd (tofu) cakes and crepes.

She has been successful in introducing jicama, an ugly brown root with a sweet carrot-like interior, to the Midwest as well as California.

“In 1972, in Columbus, Ohio, no one ever heard of jicama, but in a short time, jicama became the No. 1 specialty item,” she said.

Caplan said her business took off in the 1960s after surveys showed that grocery store produce sections were the largest moneymakers and one of the most important departments for consumers in choosing a store.

“Now they’re falling all over themselves to provide variety in the produce department,” she said.

Caplan attributes her success to several factors, including the health-fitness craze, medical reports linking the consumption of fresh produce to a low cancer rate, and a rash of nouvelle cuisine restaurants that use exotic foods.

“It started with the movement for anything fresh,” she said. “That really started with the McGovern Report in 1977 urging people to eat fresh produce for their health.

“That has penetrated down to where people are constantly hearing, ‘If you want to fight cancer, eat fresh, eat fresh, eat fresh.’ ”

America’s trend toward adventurous, healthy foods has helped Caplan parlay a part-time job buying mushrooms into an international firm with annual sales that will blossom from $11 million last year to $13.5 million this year.

Her latest move is to introduce to grocery stores small baskets filled with imported squash and fruits, from the bright yellow horned New Zealand fruit called kiwanos to the small, fat cooking bananas called plantains and manzanos.

Her squash, from the turban type to spaghetti squash, have grown in popularity over the years, thanks to the increased use of microwaves. Most cooks shied away from cooking squash during the summer months because the long cooking hours made the kitchen too hot, Caplan said.

Caplan’s homespun marketing genius led her to add large recipe cards explaining to shoppers the history and uses of the unfamiliar fruits and vegetables.

“The key to our program is our recipes,” she said.

24th Anniversary

The company, which celebrated its 24th anniversary this year, receives about 10,000 letters a year asking for recipes and other information, she said. Two full-time consumer specialists handle the mail.

Some of her products, such as squash and alfalfa sprouts, are inexpensive; others are quite pricey. The kiwano, which is the size of a large lemon and tastes like a tart banana, costs nearly $5 each, Caplan said.

But few of the fruits are rotting while waiting for buyers, she said.

“People like to pamper themselves when it comes to food,” she said.