Fruits, Vegetables : Taste Goes Exotic--So Do Growers

In a West Los Angeles supermarket, a middle-aged shopper squinted intently at a recipe for “Polynesian french fries” pasted to a homely brown tuber. It was a taro root, which Polynesians don’t make into french fries but traditionally boil and mash into poi, hardly a fast-food specialty.

Other shoppers examined more than a dozen varieties of squash--from the standard banana, zucchini, summer and crookneck squashes to chayote (resembling a pale green brain), green and yellow versions of table queen squash, turban squash, gold nugget squash and dumpling, spaghetti, kabocha, butternut and acorn squashes.

One who tried her hand at spaghetti squash, based on a recipe attached to the melon-size vegetable whose cooked flesh resembles pasta, said she also consulted “my corner ethnics” and came up with “a Japanese-Jewish-Italian spaghetti squash--it was wonderful!”

Variety of Changes

No doubt about it, people’s tastes are changing. And the changes, on display in the nation’s supermarkets, are making their mark all along the nation’s food chain:

- Growers are turning to exotic, and profitable, crops.

- Enterprising wholesalers are seeking high-value agricultural novelties. - Astonished retailers have seen long-neglected produce departments develop star quality as a draw for customers.

- Consumers are doing such things as dipping edible buds into egg batter for deep frying, and sauteing unusual peppers for side dishes or Mexican fajitas.

All this spells new and profitable sales opportunities for those who can develop and satisfy consumer tastes for full-grown but miniature vegetables, golden spiny “jelly melons,” fresh herbs, red pears, white tomatoes, elephant-heart plums, pepino (a lemon-sized melon) and babaco (a melon masquerading as a cucumber).

Driving Force

A major factor behind the proliferation of such specialty items in supermarket produce departments is pioneering Los Angeles-based wholesaler Frieda Caplan, a feisty grandmother who said she got into the wholesale business because the odd hours allowed her to nurse her daughter, Karen, now president and chief operating officer. (A second daughter, Jackie, handles national sales.)

Her company, Frieda’s Finest/Specialty Produce Inc., in its quarter of a century of existence has opened up market after market for new items in an era when overall demand for food is leveling off in this country as family size shrinks.

Over the years, Caplan has been credited with elevating the fuzzy and dusky Chinese gooseberry into the now-familiar kiwifruit and with finding farmers willing to invest in growing such formerly imported items as cherimoya, a custard-like fruit from South America.

This year, Caplan is seeking to broaden demand for the dozen varieties of specialty squashes she has helped bring to market. Working with her hand-picked growers, she is orchestrating the flow of squash, week by week and grower by grower, to assure retailers of a year-round supply of the colorful vegetables.

“I’m trying to find a niche for each farmer,” she explained.

In a similar way, David Berkley has founded a thriving retail business as a purveyor of specialty foods and fine wines in Sacramento’s posh new Pavilions shopping center. Berkley knows that his clientele--generally young, curious, affluent, health-conscious and short of time--expects to see something different and fresh at his place than they find at the neighborhood supermarket. So he carries field-ripened and organically grown farm-fresh fruits and vegetables to complement a daily array of elegant, oven-ready entrees.

“There’s no reason for me to do stacks and stacks and stacks of iceberg lettuce. What we do is a selection of lettuce and green leaves that are not generally available,” he said.

‘Niche Marketing’

Berkley calls this “niche marketing” and, like Frieda Caplan, he works with local farmers to obtain what his niche demands--like organically grown blueberries from the nearby foothill town of Loomis and prime-quality beef from Harris Ranch near Coalinga.

Farmers, faced with heavy debt and falling prices, have turned to the exotica of agriculture as a simple survival technique. In short, summed up Kenneth R. Farrell, who directs the National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy: “Steak and potatoes are giving way to sushi and tofu.”

Specialty crops help assure farmers of better prices and more stable markets. And the diversification that accompanies such farming gives them the flexibility to shift gears when any single specialty market turns sour.

“Most contemporary farmers--my peers--think the days of one-crop farming are long gone,” said Jay North, who grows 100 different items, including edible flowers, at his Paradise Farms in Ventura County. “You’ve got to diversify.”

Must Keep Diversifying

But, because one year’s profitable commodity will quickly attract other profit-hungry farmers and destroy the market, farmers must keep diversifying, North said. “Once edible flowers are gone, we have other kinds of specialty crops we want to go into--but I’m not about to talk about them !”

John Balleto has built his business by responding to the changing market. In just four years, he has expanded his business from farming a few acres of zucchini in Santa Rosa, Calif., to working nearly 100 acres producing 58 specialty crops--among them beets, Swiss chard, mustard, dill, kale, collards, 15 varieties of lettuce and four of squash. “By growing quality produce, demand just keeps increasing,” he said.

Other farmers have taken similar steps, either moving into specialty produce or finding unusual, new markets for their existing produce:

- Allan Corrin found a new market for small clusters of ruby seedless table grapes that ripen after the main clumps are harvested. He dubbed them, at his wife’s suggestion, “The Lunch Bunch” and began selling them to institutions and restaurants for use as a garnish or ready-to-serve snacks. He also sells tiny and sweet black Corinth grapes fresh rather than dried into currants, marketing the clusters of caviar-size berries as “Champagne Grapes.”

- Bill Fulton of Fulton Farms in Troy, Ohio, near Dayton, grows a special strain of corn to specifications set by Cornnuts Inc., which produces the crunchy snack in Oakland, Calif. In exchange, Fulton is guaranteed a price for his crop before it is planted, a rarity in the produce business.

- Mike Beyries and a partner formed Enfant Riant Escargot, which he describes as the nation’s only snail cannery, after discovering “that there was a demand for escargot in this country, but zero production.” The plant in Petaluma, Calif., buys ordinary California brown snails from bedeviled citrus, avocado and kiwi growers, fattens them, purges their digestive systems, then cans them. They are sold through Macy’s, Neiman-Marcus, specialty shops nationwide and such celebrated restaurants as Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the Americana Restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., Jasper’s in Boston, Escargot in Chicago, and Tavern on the Green in New York City.

- Providing snails to Enfant Riant (laughing child) has in itself become something of a secondary crop for Charles E. Whipple, manager of the Ojai Land Co. in Ventura County. “We turned a real negative problem into something positive,” he said. “In fact, there’s a little bit of profit. If you figured in what you would have to spend to control them, it’s a lot better to remove them physically-- and get paid for it.”

- Laura Chenel’s dozen goats were prolific producers of milk for which there was no ready market until she began making smooth and creamy cheese five years ago as sophisticated consumers on both coasts were belatedly discovering French chevre . Now Chenel has no time to care for goats. She buys milk for her California Chevre cheese factory, in the rolling coastal hills northwest of Santa Rosa, from nine neighboring goat herds. She produces about 60,000 pounds of chevre a year. Farther north in McKinleyville, Mary Konnersman began selling cheese she made from the prize French Alpine goats she raises to the nearby Larrupin Cafe, and has just forged links to two distributors to handle her Cypress Grove Chevre cheeses.

One side effect of shifting national food tastes is reflected in efforts by many hard-pressed growers to find ways to latch onto more of the retail food dollar, out of which they earn less than 30 cents. While most continue to produce for handlers who process and distribute their crops, many also are beginning to put out gift packs, open roadside stands and participate in a proliferation of farmers’ markets--more than 90 of which now operate regularly in California, 23 in the Los Angeles Basin.

Happening Everywhere

“It’s going on wherever the population areas are,” said Henry J. Voss, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, who farms in the San Joaquin Valley town of Ceres. “You find it in Ohio, Michigan, New York and all along the East Coast.”

Voss said more of his fellow farmers are devoting a few acres to vegetables that they can sell themselves. “Several of my friends have two or three roadside stands where they now sell 20 acres of produce in a summer,” he said.

Such direct marketing eliminates the costs of middlemen who sort, pack, cool, ship, store, broker, wholesale and retail the crops.

“The money normally paid to others for their services can be split between the farmer, in the form of a higher return, and the consumer, in lower prices paid,” pointed out W. Les Portello, who heads the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s direct-marketing program.

For many farmers, the emphasis on marketing does not come easily. Most of them “are introverts--not among themselves, but with the public,” said Don Christopher, a major grower and shipper of garlic and partner in Garlic World, a direct-sales store on Highway 101 south of Gilroy, Calif. “It’s hard for them to be salespeople, to sell themselves.”

Making More Profit

But sell is what he and his brother, Art, have done over the last 30 years, he said, explaining: “We quickly found out there were no profits in farming. Oh, you could make a living , but that’s about it.”

To improve profitability, the brothers moved into packing, built their own cold-storage plant, acquired their own ice-making machine, accumulated their own fleet of trucks (whose bumpers exhort the world to Go Garlic! )--and now have their own sales outlet.

“We’re completely integrated now,” Christopher said. “We’ve really cut out the man who makes the two bits on the ice, the guy that makes something on selling your products . . . trucking ourselves probably saves us 10% to 20%.”

Such are the determined efforts of farmers to preserve, or restore, profits to their business.

Caplan, the produce wholesaler, said she gets “40 or 50” plaintive calls a week from financially strapped farmers asking, “What can I grow profitably?”

There are no miracle cures, she tells them, but the odds will increase as they find a niche for themselves and then boost production as demand develops.

Not a ‘Quick Fix’

“Unless you’ve got a built-in client base,” she said she warns them, “stay out of fresh herbs, baby vegetables--things that are easy to switch to.” Instead of looking for what she calls “a quick fix,” Caplan suggests investing in a crop like quinces, which, though they takes several years to come into production, are safer and can command a high price. Quinces now retail for more than $1.50 a pound.

But she insists that her farmers follow a mutually agreed-upon market plan so that an emerging new market will not be overwhelmed with too much product too soon. Her advice: Be patient and start small--plant just a few rows to test the market and strive to improve the product’s taste and appearance.

After all, she said, developing a commercially successful miniature carrot took a dozen years. And it took time to transform the obscure Chinese gooseberry into the chic and omnipresent kiwi.

“An 18-year, overnight sensation,” she calls it.