Meet the Queen of Kiwi: The 96-Year-Old Woman Who Transformed America's Produce Aisle (ENCORE)

Speaker 1 Hey, we're on the road reporting an exciting new story this week.

Speaker 1 So, while we're out scrambling around in the dirt and surviving on Trail Mix, we thought we'd treat you to an encore presentation of one of our favorite episodes.

Speaker 2 It's about a woman who revolutionized the variety of fruits and vegetables we're able to find on our plates.

Speaker 2 Frida Kaplan was the queen of the kiwi and plenty of other weird fruits besides, and we're bringing this encore to you thanks to our friends at American Express.

Speaker 1 Enjoy, and we'll be back in just a week with a brand new episode.

Speaker 3 Some of my favorite memories are getting on the phone and taking one of these orange spiky horn melons and trying to describe on the telephone to some guy, because everybody was a guy, you know, some young girl who's, you know, talking about this orange, spiky, cucumber-ish thing that you've got to have.

Speaker 2 Orange, spiky, cucumber-ish thing? What's going on and why does he have to have it?

Speaker 1 That exact response is something Karen Kaplan has heard before, many times. An endless chorus of what? What is that? Why would I want to buy that?

Speaker 2 And Karen would tell the person on the other end, who was usually a buyer for a grocery store, that they just had to have the latest cool new fruit or vegetable that their customers had never eaten but were about to fall in love with.

Speaker 1 Not an easy sell, to be honest.

Speaker 1 Getting Americans to try new fruits and vegetables that they'd never heard of, seen, or tasted before, oftentimes with names they can't even pronounce, it's an an uphill struggle.

Speaker 1 So how did Karen do it?

Speaker 2 That's just the story we're telling this episode. You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.
I'm Cynthia Graeber.

Speaker 1 And I'm Nicola Twilley. And here's my other question.
Why was Karen even bothering to try to get us all to eat horned melons?

Speaker 2 Right, isn't it enough that Americans enjoy apples, bananas, maybe some oranges and grapes?

Speaker 1 I love apples and bananas, but you know what I also love? I love kiwis. And we wouldn't have kiwi fruit in the mix if it wasn't for Karen's mother, Frida Kaplan.

Speaker 1 She is the woman who introduced the kiwi into the barren wasteland of the 1960s supermarket produce isle in America, along with about 200 other fruits and veggies that I can't imagine living without.

Speaker 2 Like sugar snap peas, dried chilies, komquat, seedless watermelon, and so many more it makes my head spin.

Speaker 2 This episode, the story of the people who have expanded our palates and our diets with all sorts of fun and sometimes freaky fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 1 And the tricks they use to get us to fall in love with these weird fruits.

Speaker 2 Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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Speaker 3 So let's go here. We're going to put on our gloves and we're going to sanitize our hands.
You ready?

Speaker 3 Okay, so

Speaker 3 can you hear the sound? That's the refrigeration equipment. The facility is, the warehouse is about 61,000 square feet.

Speaker 1 Already I'm excited because I love refrigeration so much that I wrote a book about it. But Karen had even more exciting things to show us.

Speaker 3 You can see all these giant palettes you're probably, what is that? That's tamarindo. So we bring in tamarindo a couple times a year and then we store it for when the market fluctuates.

Speaker 3 It looks like a potted legume. The inside is almost like a fig paste and tart and it is the secret ingredient in Worcestershire sauce.

Speaker 2 Karen Kaplan was showing us around the warehouse of Frida's specialty produce in Los Alamitos, California. It's just south of downtown LA.

Speaker 3 So we can see here that we have some taro root and some looks like malanga and we have

Speaker 3 baby pineapples.

Speaker 3 So they're packing a rambutan over here, rambutan rather, also known as hairy lychee. These are from Guatemala and you can see how beautiful they are.

Speaker 1 We went to Frida's because it is basically where all the new fruits and vegetables on our supermarket shelves come from.

Speaker 1 Frida's is ground zero for a new fruit or vegetable that is looking to make it in America.

Speaker 2 Frida's produce has been ground zero for new fruits and vegetables for more than half a century now.

Speaker 1 Ever since it was founded by Karen's mother, Frida Kaplan. But everything, the family business, the idea of introducing new fruits and vegetables, Karen says it all happened almost by accident.

Speaker 3 So the way my mom tells the story, and by the way, she's 96 and doing well, is after she had me a long time ago, she was looking for a job with flexible hours.

Speaker 3 So if you you remember in the late 50s, most women didn't work. So she and she, my dad, they both had to work.

Speaker 2 As it happens, Karen's dad, Frida's husband, his aunt and uncle managed a produce company that had a spot at the LA produce market, this giant wholesale market downtown where supermarket buyers would go shopping.

Speaker 3 So she saw them at like a family gathering and said, hey, I'm looking to make a career change. Do you know anyone in the produce industry that might be hiring?

Speaker 3 And they said, Frida, you called on the right day. Our bookkeeper just quit.
You can start tomorrow. They did not interview her or nothing.

Speaker 1 Which was lucky because Frida wasn't exactly qualified for the job.

Speaker 3 So my mom studied political science. She did not take math, by the way.
When my aunt and uncle offered her a job as a bookkeeper, I'm like, oh my God, did they even know?

Speaker 3 I mean, she got like a D in math.

Speaker 8 And you have to understand, I knew nothing about produce or fruits and vegetables other than what I ate.

Speaker 2 That second voice is Frida herself. We didn't have the chance to meet her in person, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 As Karen mentioned, she's 96 and she had a broken leg when we were visiting, but she was interviewed for a movie about her life called Fear No Fruit.

Speaker 1 So Frida started work upstairs in the offices, and after a few weeks, her aunt and uncle said, hey, we're going on vacation.

Speaker 3 Because Frida, my mom, was a family member. They said, Frida, can you come in a little bit earlier? Go downstairs, kind of keep an eye on the cashiering.
So she went down there and she loved it.

Speaker 2 She enjoyed the hustle and bustle and the people selling all the different fruits and vegetables downstairs on the produce floor. And she got into the spirit of it all.

Speaker 3 She saw a stack of mushrooms sitting next to the cashier cage and she noticed no one was paying attention to them so she started selling them.

Speaker 1 At the time most stores only carried white button mushrooms. These mushrooms were brown.
They're sometimes called chestnut mushrooms or cremony mushrooms or baby bellas.

Speaker 1 They're the same species as button mushrooms but they're a little bit more mature so they have a richer flavor and they look different, which made the produce buyers of the time a little wary.

Speaker 2 But Frida saw their wariness as an opportunity, not a barrier. She just decided those unloved mushrooms needed a little bit of a boost.

Speaker 8 So as I was cashiering, I would ask each of the customers, can you use any mushrooms? That mushrooms, which were considered a great specialty at that time.

Speaker 8 Most of them said no, but one of the chain stores responded, Nie says, yes, I can use it for a Thanksgiving ad.

Speaker 3 And then after she sold them, like the next day more came in. So she sold those.
And like one thing led to another.

Speaker 3 And eventually, she's the person credited with launching and promoting the California Fresh Brown Mushroom Market.

Speaker 1 This is hard to imagine today, but those brown mushrooms, they really were pretty exotic at the time. So how did Frida persuade people to buy them?

Speaker 3 She's charming.

Speaker 3 I mean, if you could meet my mom, she's just, her eyes sparkle, she fluffs her hair, she puts on her lipstick, and I think she saw the mushrooms, and she doesn't cook, by the way, so it wasn't because she loved mushrooms.

Speaker 3 She loved to eat them, but she didn't know how to cook them.

Speaker 3 And, you know, she saw something there and it was an opportunity and she just took advantage of it.

Speaker 2 Frida was a natural, but not because she had any particular interest in getting into produce for a lifetime career or even any particular passion for food.

Speaker 2 As Karen said, Frida did love to eat, but she didn't go wild over a new flavor the way that Nikki and I do all the time.

Speaker 3 So my mom doesn't cook and she has never met a meal she doesn't like. But it was really, it wasn't really because she loved food.
It was really that she met really interesting people.

Speaker 3 And those interesting people brought her interesting products.

Speaker 1 Frida loved meeting people and building relationships and she also loved promoting, finding something that needed some love like a brown mushroom and making sure it got that love.

Speaker 3 She went to UCLA and she was a campaign manager for many successful people who ran for office at UCLA because she loved to promote. She saw something fantastic and then she promoted it.

Speaker 2 When it came to produce she started with mushrooms but she quickly caught the produce promotion fever and started selling all sorts of fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 2 She'd stop and chat and find out what the growers had to sell.

Speaker 3 They were small farmers, most of them,

Speaker 3 and no one would listen to them. It's hard to imagine 60 years ago what it was like.
There's no farmers' markets. Okay, so there was no outlet for these products.

Speaker 1 Farmers mostly grew the fruits and veggies that the market wanted, the iceberg lettuce and yellow onions.

Speaker 1 But they also grew other things, things that grew well on their farm, things they love to eat in their culture, things that helped make their farm more biodiverse and healthy.

Speaker 2 But like Karen says, there were no farmers' markets or CSAs, and it was really hard for these farmers to sell these smaller, more unusual crops they were growing.

Speaker 3 So these people, these men, would come down the walk on the LA produce market, and they would stop at every place and they would say,

Speaker 1 I have passion fruit.

Speaker 3 Do you want it? And everyone would say, no, I only sell tomatoes, lettuce, you know, lemons, onions. Go talk to Frida.
She'll talk to anybody.

Speaker 3 So literally, everyone in the industry got referred to my mom.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't hard to spot her because Frida was, in fact, pretty much the only woman working the floor of the LA produce market. Karen says the produce business was basically 100% male.

Speaker 3 Now remember, this is the late 50s. So there were no pants or jeans for women.

Speaker 3 So at two o'clock in the morning, my mom in her high heels, I mean, not super high, but nice shoes, pantyhose, and dresses, right, with her horn room glasses, would drive down.

Speaker 3 to the downtown LA produce market and they were all men. And here she was like a shining shining star.
So she didn't see obstacles. My mom would tell you she's never seen obstacles.

Speaker 3 So she didn't know that women didn't do this. She didn't know that no one had sold mushrooms before.
She didn't know that that was abnormal.

Speaker 2 The gender diversity on the produce department floor was pretty non-existent. And the diversity in the produce department in the supermarkets, that wasn't so great either.

Speaker 8 You have to understand when Frida's first started, there were maybe 60 items at the most in a produce department.

Speaker 1 There'd be just one type of tomato, one type of lettuce, one type of apple, maybe

Speaker 3 a yellow and a red onion. Maybe.
I don't even know if red onions were around back then.

Speaker 1 So Frida and her freaky fruit stood out and people noticed. People saw that this young woman was single-handedly introducing new fruits and vegetables to the American supermarket.

Speaker 8 The owners of Southern Pacific Railway came to me and said, Frida, we want you to go into business for yourself.

Speaker 8 I said, you're kidding, not me. I said, I know nothing about money and I have no experience running about business.
He said, well, they have two doors available.

Speaker 8 We've been watching you this last five or six years and we are convinced you would be very successful and you're selling something that is quite unusual.

Speaker 3 I said, Frida, we think you have potential. I feel like that's in the movie Pretty Woman.
You have potential.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 she went home, talked to my dad, and then talked to her father, who both said they would be very supportive.

Speaker 3 So, my grandpa took her to the bank and helped her borrow money and then said, pay it back right away. So, she established credit, and that's how she launched her business.

Speaker 2 I want to point out, in case this slipped by you, listeners, in 1962, Frida needed her dad to be able to borrow money. She couldn't even apply without a man.

Speaker 2 In the late 60s, when my mom was first married, she couldn't get a credit card under her own name. It had to be my dad's credit card under his name.

Speaker 2 It's frankly ridiculous, and it wasn't that long ago.

Speaker 1 The very first year Frida was in business, she met the fruit that made her name, the Chinese gooseberry.

Speaker 3 So apparently the way I understand it, a consumer in Salt Lake City had just returned from a mission that they'd been in New Zealand and they tried this fruit.

Speaker 3 So they went into their local supermarket in Salt Lake City, which at that time was a Safeway, and said to the produce manager, I had this really great fruit.

Speaker 3 It's called the Chinese gooseberry when I was on my mission in New Zealand.

Speaker 2 Do you have them? So the produce manager decided to pursue this and he called the head buyer of Safeway, who was based in LA. His name was Larry.

Speaker 1 And Larry was super busy, but he said, let me see what I can find out.

Speaker 3 So he goes around the produce market and asks person to person, have you ever heard of Chinese gooseberry? And they're like, no, we haven't. Go see Frida.
She probably knows.

Speaker 1 Frida, as it happens, had actually never heard of a Chinese gooseberry.

Speaker 3 And instead of saying no, she said, oh. I don't know.
That's interesting. Let me see what I can find out.

Speaker 2 Frida kept the Chinese gooseberry in the back of her mind.

Speaker 3 And a couple of months later, an importer named Bill got a telegram, literally a telegram it offered him a new product he might want to sell from New Zealand so he goes from person to person on the produce market and says I have an opportunity to import this I don't even know what they are they're called Chinese gooseberries from New Zealand do you want them everyone said no and they said go ask Frida so he Bill gets to Frida and he said Frida I have this opportunity to import 200 boxes of Chinese gooseberries from New Zealand.

Speaker 3 Are you interested? And she's like, Chinese gooseberries? Oh my God, 200? I'll take them all. I already have my first customer.

Speaker 1 And then the Chinese gooseberries arrived.

Speaker 3 And they're really ugly. They're brown and they're fuzzy and they're hard.

Speaker 2 That one former missionary in Utah might have been happy to find his favorite Chinese gooseberries, but nobody else was interested in brown, hard, fuzzy fruit.

Speaker 3 So anyway, so after the first six months of only selling 200 boxes, which is nothing, I mean, a single store will sell that in a week now.

Speaker 3 She thought, they got to do something with the look and the name.

Speaker 3 So she took all the profits she made and she sent them back to the growers in New Zealand, again, totally uncommon, and said, look, I suggest you change the name. She had been brainstorming.

Speaker 3 And people from New Zealand are called kiwis. And then there's a bird that's brown and fuzzy.
It doesn't fly called the kiwi. And she said, why don't we call the fruit kiwi fruit?

Speaker 3 And then here's all my profits. You need to develop marketing material.

Speaker 1 This was Frida the campaign manager at work. She saw this fruit.
It had potential. For starters, it had a great shelf life, which she discovered because it took so long to sell her first 200 boxes.

Speaker 1 But it needed a marketing makeover, and so that's what she did. This was revolutionary.
No one really marketed fruit in the 60s. Fruit was just an apple for sale, not a brand with a story.

Speaker 2 Then Frida did something else new with the kiwis, something else people had never really done before. She thought people might fall in love with kiwis if they tasted them.

Speaker 2 So she enlisted local chefs to make products with kiwis and give tastes away for free on the produce market floor.

Speaker 3 She got the local bakery, it's called Vikman's. It's a local bakery right there on the produce market.
And she gave them free fruit. And she said, can you make some fruit tarts? And

Speaker 3 we do sampling all the time now, right? You go in the supermarket, you want to try something, they'll catch a piece of cheese or whatever. This is back in 1962.

Speaker 3 She got the local bakery to bake the tarts. At 2 o'clock in the morning, there's my mom standing out there handing out fruit tarts to the buyers.
Because, you know, how do you get them to...

Speaker 3 put the fruit in their store. Well, they have to taste it.

Speaker 1 You have to realize the kiwi was the first new fruit that had been introduced to America for 90 years. Since the banana.

Speaker 2 And Frida figured out how to end that long fruit dry spell. Her tactics worked.
Kiwis, the fruit formerly known as Chinese gooseberries, they caught on.

Speaker 8 It began a groundswell of interest by all sorts of people, and then the press picked up on it. So it was a new story right from the beginning.

Speaker 8 And because we were the ones handling it, somehow food editors started calling me the queen of kiwis.

Speaker 1 But the newly crowned queen of kiwi did not stop there because now she had a reputation.

Speaker 3 People approached her. And we used to take almost anything anyone approached us with, we would take on and sell.

Speaker 2 Karen grew up in the business. She says she started working in produce basically by age 10.
So by the 60s, when Frida started introducing all sorts of new things, Karen was already on board.

Speaker 1 That decade, Frida introduced blood oranges, and guavas and shallots, and Belgian endive, and tamarillos, and something I've still never even heard of today: the lavender gem tangilolo, which is apparently a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit.

Speaker 2 By the 1970s, Karen was working with Frida full-time. And so we asked her, How do you convince grocery store buyers across the country to try something like a lavender gem tangilolo?

Speaker 1 It's the 70s, remember, so there's no email. Business is all done by phone.
So

Speaker 3 100% of our customers were men. By happen chance, all of the salespeople at Frida's Frida's were women.
Okay, so you tell me.

Speaker 3 The phone rings and the secretary says, hey, Joe, you got Bob on one, Bill on two, and there's some girl named Frida or Karen on three. What lines are you going to pick up first?

Speaker 3 He doesn't want to talk to a guy. He'd love to talk to a girl.
And I don't say this in a sexual way at all, but you know, like we give good phone. Okay, way more fun talking to us.

Speaker 2 But it wasn't enough to just be a woman. Karen still had a job to do.
Each of these buyers had met Karen and Frida at trade shows or at the wholesale market.

Speaker 2 They did want to distinguish themselves somehow from the neighborhood competition.

Speaker 3 So Column says, what do you need this week?

Speaker 1 Obviously, they needed the basics, tomatoes, apples, onions, but that's not what Karen was there to sell.

Speaker 3 So if you say to them, you know, it's citrus season in the winter and you're...

Speaker 3 looking to make your display stand out, you could buy a case of kumquats for $15 and put them on display. And you could do sampling because they're really easy.
You make your display look different.

Speaker 3 You'll be the only one in your town that would have Comquats to offer.

Speaker 3 And oh, by the way, they were just written up in Bonapa T magazine, which means consumers are going to be looking for the product, or they were on the Julia Child cooking show.

Speaker 2 This sounds convincing, but the men on the other end of the line weren't so quick to say yes. They had plenty of reasons that ComeQuats, or whatever Karen wanted to sell, wasn't a great idea.

Speaker 3 Oh my God, they've got a whole list. It's like, I swear they have a script.
So, you know, the script is, well, first of all, I don't know what that is. I don't like it.
I have no room to display it.

Speaker 3 I don't have time to set it up in my system. Your price is too high, meaning the product itself is too expensive.
And

Speaker 3 my shoppers don't have that much money. They might say,

Speaker 3 I don't have room in my truck. I don't have a truck to send it, which is how we started doing stuff by air.
We would fly things in air containers. They might say they don't like that color.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's unbelievable. That's why you had to be prepared when you got on the phone to say, well, you may not like them, but can I send you a sample?

Speaker 3 And can I send you a sample with a recipe so you can take it home and you can try it? So like, if you try it, how can you say no? I mean, when you're eating food with someone, how can you say no?

Speaker 3 You can't say no.

Speaker 1 Or rather, they could still say no, but Karen wasn't going to give up.

Speaker 3 I mean, I just think of when we introduced Inoki mushrooms, those little white, you know, kind of sour mushrooms or dried chili peppers. Remember selling those to a client.

Speaker 3 And I remember being so defeated because he didn't want them. I'm like, how could you not want them? I've just described them to you.
And he's like, he didn't get it, right?

Speaker 3 So you just can't be defeated when they say no, because no really means not yet.

Speaker 2 And her sales pitch did often work because of FOMO, you know, for those of you who don't spend all of your time online, fear of missing out.

Speaker 3 So if, if you say,

Speaker 3 oh, well, I thought you should probably take it because your competing supermarket just gave me an order. So it's up to you.
If you don't, it's okay if you don't want it.

Speaker 3 You know, or, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of techniques you can use to get, I mean, truthful techniques to get them interested. So.

Speaker 1 So that's that's how Karen and the sales team at Frida's would get produce managers to buy this weird new fruit and veg. But after that, there's a whole other challenge.

Speaker 1 How do you get ordinary American grocery shoppers to buy it? That's coming up after the break.

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Speaker 2 Frida and Karen and the rest of the team at Frida's Specialty Produce didn't just assume that once they sold, say, sunchokes to a supermarket, those were the small brownish root of a sunflower.

Speaker 2 Frida knew that wasn't the end of their job.

Speaker 3 So when my mom introduced sunchokes, we introduced sun chokes in 1972. And they're also known as Jerusalem Artochoks.
They're kind of knobby and they have to be refrigerated.

Speaker 3 And I mean, they're just ugly. So she shipped them to one of her clients in Chicago, Jewel Foods.
They're still a client. They're still a retailer.

Speaker 3 And I remember the buyer calling my mom and said, Frida, I don't know what I'm going to do.

Speaker 2 The first problem was that the sun chokes were getting mushy too quickly, but that wasn't the only issue.

Speaker 1 Frida's had introduced root ginger at about the same time, and Jewel had ordered some of that too.

Speaker 8 And about two months after they made their first purchase, we got a panic call.

Speaker 3 frida our produce managers and our customers can't tell the difference between sun chokes and ginger they look so much alike like if you don't come up with a solution i'm going to be discontinuing them so that was her inspiration for her first package so and this is before shelf life testing and all this fancy stuff so she took sun chokes and she got some guy to come up in a plastic bag this is like Thinking about it now, it's like heresy in the packaging business.

Speaker 3 She took a little recipe flyer that she stapled on top of the bag. So who wants staples in their produce, right?

Speaker 3 And what happened was by offering the sun chokes in one pound bags, in plastic bags, it extended the shelf life so it didn't go bad.

Speaker 3 It identified the product not only for the consumer, but for the front end and for the produce manager. So he knew, and it was all men at the time, knew what to do with it.

Speaker 3 And the way the story goes is that sales increased 600%.

Speaker 3 So six times as many sun chokes were sold because my mom put them in a package.

Speaker 2 Obviously, single-use plastic bags are a problem today, but this was revolutionary at the time.

Speaker 2 Until this point, produce wasn't offered in packages that could keep it fresher longer, but maybe even more importantly, it was the first real label.

Speaker 8 What it did, it stunned the produce industry because outside of sunk is stamping the word sunkis on an orange, there had never been any labeling or packaging in our industry.

Speaker 1 The label said what it was and where it was from, and even things like how to know if it was ripe. Like you have to wait until your passion fruit is wrinkled before you eat it.

Speaker 8 And we had space on the label. I said well let's put something on the back side.
So I had them put dear customer if you want more recipes or information about this item please contact us.

Speaker 8 We were flooded with letters.

Speaker 2 Maybe four to eight hundred a week, all of which they answered. So Frida and Karen came up with another brilliant idea.

Speaker 2 Frida didn't cook, but she decided it'd be a good idea to have recipes on the labels too.

Speaker 3 I used to develop a lot of the recipes myself at home. That was one of my first other jobs.

Speaker 3 So she would bring a product home like spaghetti squash and would say, I need a recipe to put on the package. Can you come up with something?

Speaker 1 Karen was just out of school and living in a little place in Hollywood at the time.

Speaker 3 Open up my refrigerator. I only have two or three ingredients.
And that's what the recipe became. The spaghetti squash with tomato sauce.

Speaker 3 grated zucchini, and shredded cheddar cheese baked in the oven. I know.
And that was even before microwaves. I'm really dating myself here.

Speaker 2 So by this point, Frida and Karen had developed a few key strategies for success, but there was one more really important one. Of course, we'd say it's important.
It's the press.

Speaker 3 I think it was like the mid-70s, we introduced sugar snap peas, and it was really hard to get a buyer.

Speaker 3 to conceptualize that we crossed a snow pea with a English pea and we got a totally edible sweet pea. And like,

Speaker 3 what's the point? Why do I need that? I've got English peas, I've got snow peas, I don't need anything else. So we go to the food writer of the Baltimore Sun.

Speaker 1 And just like us, the food food writer is intrigued. A new vegetable?

Speaker 3 That's exciting. And she puts a story in the front page of the food section, which always came out usually Wednesdays or Thursdays.

Speaker 3 And it comes out in the food section, these amazing, totally edible sweet peas. And people get the food section and they come to their local market at the time was AMP supermarkets.

Speaker 3 And they are lining up because stores were not open 24 hours a day then. They opened like at 8 or 9 in the morning.
And they were lined up outside the store for the sugar snap peas.

Speaker 3 And then the buyer at the chain calls my mom and Frida, like, how come you haven't offered me? There is in the food section. She goes, I did offer it to you, but you said no.

Speaker 3 Well, next time I say no, ignore me and just send it anyway. So literally, that's how it worked.

Speaker 2 It's not obvious yet. Frida and Karen are responsible for hundreds of the products that you can find today in grocery stores all around the U.S.

Speaker 3 So, of course, there was kiwi fruit, red seedless grapes we introduced, red seedless watermelons. Who knew, right? Yellow watermelon.
Things like jicama, every kind of chili pepper.

Speaker 3 I remember introducing the habanero chili, which was 100 times hotter than a jalapeno, which is nothing because now Trinidad scorpion and ghost chilies are, you know, a million times hotter.

Speaker 3 Things like passion fruit, other tropical fruits like starfruit, dragon fruit, jackfruit, vijoas, tamarillas.

Speaker 3 On the vegetable side, every squash imaginable.

Speaker 3 My mom had a hand in introducing whether it was sweet dumpling squash, gold nugget, delicata, spaghetti squash, cabocha, acorn, gold acorn, just all of those things, fresh herbs.

Speaker 3 So I remember selling chervil, like eight ounces of chervil for $25 wholesale. And those are mostly going to chefs, but no one was selling fresh herbs.

Speaker 3 It was basil or we said sold potted herbs, pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, elephant garlic, shallots. The list goes on.

Speaker 1 It's actually kind of hard to imagine a produce section of the supermarket today without those fruits and vegetables and herbs. But they're all there thanks to Frida's specialty produce.

Speaker 1 Frida's stepped down now. Karen and her sister Jackie took over the business at the end of the 80s.

Speaker 2 Although they don't sell kiwi fruit anymore. It's too common now.
But even without kiwis, they still have plenty of other options.

Speaker 2 They've barely scratched the surface of everything we could theoretically be eating.

Speaker 3 So probably 30 years ago, I was really worried, like we're going to run out of products. So at that time, we were working with a scientist.
His name is Dr.

Speaker 3 Noel Viedmeier from the National Academy of Sciences. And so my mom said to him, Noel, are we ever going to run out of fruits and vegetables to sell?

Speaker 3 Because, you know, she's introducing all these new things. He said, Frida, there's between 20 and 80,000 edible species on the planet.
Only about 200 are commercially developed.

Speaker 3 So you're not going to run out of anything.

Speaker 1 But wait, not every fruit or vegetable travels well. The kiwi may have had great shelf life, but what about the cherimoya? That story is coming up after the break.

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Speaker 3 So I actually did my marketing thesis on cherimoya when I was in college at UC Davis.

Speaker 3 And so what's so amazing about the Chirimoya is the way they say it in Chile, is, you know, that it's, Mark Twain said it tastes like deliciousness itself.

Speaker 2 I became obsessed with the cherimoya when I spent a few weeks reporting in Peru. They call it the ice cream fruit there because it's white and super creamy and delicate.

Speaker 2 It tastes like this light floral, maybe a little banana-y fruit, maybe a hint of strawberry. Truly, truly delicious.

Speaker 2 Some people do grow them in the U.S., but they're nearly impossible to find in the grocery store.

Speaker 3 Chiramoyas are unique in that they ripen faster than any other fruit when it's exposed to ethylene, which is naturally given off by bananas or apples or any other kind of palm fruit.

Speaker 3 And so then they get soft.

Speaker 1 They get really soft and they're a funny shape and they have really thin skin so they bruise and then go bad really easily. Basically, they're a disaster to try to ship.

Speaker 3 Chiramoya was actually my favorite fruit in the whole world, but for the very reason that you said, it's really a challenge. And I don't know if there's much future for fresh cherimoya.

Speaker 3 The bad thing is,

Speaker 3 and chirimoya is grown a lot in Chile.

Speaker 3 And there's a whole industry there that wants to export it because they can get a really good return for the growers. And I've been to Chile.
I've seen them where they're gorgeous chirimoyas.

Speaker 3 And the national dessert of Chile is called

Speaker 3 Chile Alegra, which means happy cheramoya. And you squirt orange juice, fresh orange squeezed over the cherimoya.
It's just unbelievable.

Speaker 3 But to ship it to the United States, they have to do a process. They dip it in wax.

Speaker 3 So they basically, I know it sounds awful, they basically take a cherimoya that's underripe and then they dip it in wax. So they basically...

Speaker 3 boil it in wax and then they ship it here and they look beautiful. They will never ever ripen, which is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of importing cheramoya

Speaker 3 the consumer is not going to have a great taste experience. And if you don't have a great taste experience, what's the point? So that was my diatribe on cheromoyas.

Speaker 2 So sad, I'll probably have to wait until I head back to South America to eat another cherimoya. But luckily, Karen has had far more successes than failures so far.

Speaker 1 Some fruit and veg cannot travel, but lots can, and when it can, the impact is huge.

Speaker 1 Frida and Karen have managed to open up an entirely new market for dragon fruit from Nicaragua, or rambatans from Guatemala, or purple sweet potatoes from California.

Speaker 2 And all this really matters to farmers. It helps give them a more stable income.
It helps them diversify their farm, which is important ecologically and also in terms of their income.

Speaker 2 And of course, it's also great for us, the eaters.

Speaker 1 Over the years, Frida's has introduced at least 200 more different fruits and vegetables. Frida and Karen and this LA-based family business have transformed our grocery stores and our daily diets.

Speaker 3 So my mom did not travel. She's been to New Zealand and Hawaii, and she went to Mexico once.
I don't think she's been anywhere else. Oh, I think she went to Canada once.
My mom never traveled.

Speaker 3 And again, there was no email, no digital cameras.

Speaker 3 It just spread like wildfire. There was this woman in Los Angeles that would try anything.
I know it's really hard to believe that there wasn't some business plan and some

Speaker 3 strategic initiative that had her or someone traveling around the world. It didn't work like that at all.

Speaker 2 Frida's specialty produce might have started kind of accidentally, but it's been incredibly successful in revolutionizing what you can find in grocery stores in America.

Speaker 2 But that's not the only way people today are helping us expand the range of what we eat.

Speaker 1 Even after 60 years of introducing Americans to new fruits and vegetables, Frita's has hardly made a dent in the astonishingly huge number of fruits and vegetables we don't eat.

Speaker 1 But there's someone working on yet another angle to get these lesser-known produce items onto our plates, and it's someone we've met before on the show.

Speaker 12 For me, one of the

Speaker 12 great pleasures in life is tasting a new flavor. I mean, I just, I love it, and I'll do a lot for that or returning to a flavor I love.
So I live a lot of my life, you know, through my mouth, I think.

Speaker 12 But I think that I'm not the only one like that.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh. I feel very seen.

Speaker 2 You listeners might recognize Air Muir's voice from our menu episode.

Speaker 2 He's the founder of the Clover Fast Casual Restaurant Chain in Boston, and he wants all of us to love fruits and vegetables as much as he does.

Speaker 12 Probably the big focus for us is vegetables and fruits that people haven't had, and by that I mean actually the thing itself.

Speaker 2 You might remember that Clover doesn't serve meat at their restaurants, but they don't advertise themselves as vegetarian. You won't see that word anywhere on any of their branding or marketing.

Speaker 12 You know, we started with just this question. Can you make a meal without meat that somebody who loves meat is going to like dream about? That was the first idea.

Speaker 1 That idea just sort of led naturally to Clover's sourcing policy because they are very quickly discovered that the best way to get the most delicious fruits and vegetables was to buy them in season from farms close to home.

Speaker 1 The fresher they were, the better they tasted.

Speaker 2 This meant that he couldn't get everything all year round. He could have a fresh tomato for a couple of months in the summer and fall, but that's it.

Speaker 2 Air has to buy what the farmers are growing, and that also means vegetables and fruit that his customers might never have tasted.

Speaker 1 But selling these fruits and veggies, as Karen told us, it's not easy. Air says it's not just that people are indifferent or unfamiliar, they're actually afraid of new foods.

Speaker 12 I suspect if you got an honest read of Americans, like probably the top fears that really, you know, influence people are fear of speaking in public and fear of different foods.

Speaker 12 And food might even trump speaking in public. I mean, I think it's probably the deepest, like the most common and deepest fears for most people.

Speaker 2 Air has a bunch of different techniques to try to get people to taste something new.

Speaker 1 Take the pawpaw. As regular listeners will know, this is a fruit Cynthia and I had never tried until earlier this year, but it's local and it's delicious and Air wanted to serve it.

Speaker 2 So he put it in foods people are familiar with and that aren't scary.

Speaker 2 He made pawpaw soda and pawpaw custard and Nikki and I were lucky enough to catch his other technique in person to get people to buy the soda and custard.

Speaker 2 Clover also offered samples of the fresh fruit.

Speaker 13 So this is a pawpaw. We're getting them from a farm in Massachusetts, but they're native to New England and they're kind of like a tropical fruit.

Speaker 13 So they taste like a mix between a banana and a mango.

Speaker 13 Yes, and they're very hard to transport, so they ripen really quickly. So it's hard to find them in stores anywhere, like in grocery stores.

Speaker 13 But we have them for like a week, so we're giving out tastes of them.

Speaker 2 Yes, please. We tried the samples and the soda.

Speaker 1 Another thing that Air says works is just word of mouth.

Speaker 1 If your friend has tried the medler sandwich and loved it and tells you that, you're more likely to give it a go yourself, even if you've never heard of a medler.

Speaker 1 Which, for those of you who haven't, is a little fruit, sort of orangey colored with a soft jelly-like flesh that's kind of like a slightly more acidic persimmon, or maybe like a much more interesting, fragrant version of apple butter.

Speaker 2 And that first person might have tried the medler sandwich because of one of Air's other techniques, and that's the clover guide, like the woman Sophie you just heard offering us a taste of pawpaws.

Speaker 2 Clover guides are the people in the restaurant whose goal is not just to take your order, but to ask you questions, find out what you've had before, and maybe suggest something new.

Speaker 12 There's much more effective.

Speaker 12 We We can have a dialogue and say what do you like, what do you not like, and it's much more likely that if we have someone doing that job well, we're going to get the customer to taste something they like than if we're just having them self-select.

Speaker 12 So that's why we do it that way.

Speaker 1 To be honest, it's not like a clover guide suggests something new and everyone immediately says, sure, I'll try that.

Speaker 1 It's a much slower process of just sort of planting the suggestion and explaining why you might love this new fruit or vegetable.

Speaker 12 And I think patience is really important to trying new food for people. There is so much fear.
I think it's like not something that's successful to try to like hurry it up.

Speaker 12 I think you just have to sometimes you have to just expose people to some of the sights and smells and then wait until they get comfortable with that and maybe give them a little taste and wait till they get comfortable with that.

Speaker 12 And I think that a lot of our relationships with customers evolve over a couple of years.

Speaker 2 And speaking of a couple of years, Air is really in this for the long term.

Speaker 2 He wants the customers to come back again and again and this ongoing food relationship builds up trust, so they'll be willing to try something new.

Speaker 12 So, you know, if somebody has had some soups they love at Clover and some soups they don't love, the chance they're going to try the Rutabaga soup is low, right?

Speaker 2 If you're not familiar with it, Rutabaga is a root vegetable. I admit it's not my favorite.

Speaker 1 Rutabaga is called Swede in England, and we had mashed Swede for school lunches, and I hated it.

Speaker 12 But if every time they had a soup at Clover, it was really wonderful, the chance they're going to try the Rutabaga soup is much higher, because maybe they don't know what it is, but they haven't been led astray by us yet.

Speaker 12 So they give it a try.

Speaker 1 And slowly but surely, person by person, Air has succeeded in expanding what his customers are willing to eat.

Speaker 12 In the very, very beginning when we had a truck, there was a woman named Pat who worked at MIT and she worked in the

Speaker 12 finance at MIT.

Speaker 12 But she'd come by every day and she'd always ask what the soups were in the morning when she came by and we'd tell her because we were always making the soups and she'd come back. And

Speaker 12 one day she came by and we said, it was a turnip soup, but similar to ritabaga. And I was like, oh, we have turnip soup.

Speaker 12 She's like, oh, she made this face and stepped back, which people love to do about food, which makes me frustrated.

Speaker 12 I mean, people don't do that about other things, but they feel like it's fine to like say terrible things about food. Hold her nose and like, oh, I can't come near that.

Speaker 12 I won't even come by for lunch. And I was like, why? You'll probably love it.
She's like, no, no, no. I hate turnips.

Speaker 12 She's like, one time at Thanksgiving, one of my relatives brought turnips and I told him they couldn't even bring that in the house.

Speaker 12 She's like, I can't stand it at all. And I was like, Pat, I was like, you've eaten eaten a lot of soups from us, you know, like, you should come try this soup.
You're going to like it too.

Speaker 12 And it's funny, she did, and she actually loved it. And she came back for that soup again and again.

Speaker 2 Air's approach is slightly different from Karen and Frida's. Frida's specialty produce buys from both American farmers and from importers, and they're looking for something exotic and unusual.

Speaker 2 But Air is looking at his own backyard, at the farmers nearby, and seeing what they have to offer that is delicious, but that we might not all be eating.

Speaker 1 Now, Pat from MIT can go to her farmers' markets in the winter months when there aren't any of the sexy, lovable fruit and veggies like tomatoes and strawberries, and she can buy those underloved turnips and give them some love.

Speaker 12 I think Americans can love lots and lots of things. I think, you know, our ancestors have, and there's no reason we shouldn't and can't.

Speaker 2 There's a stereotype that Americans in general have really limited diets and fairly limited palates, too, and that it's hard to get us to eat something new.

Speaker 2 As Karen and Erin know, it might be a little challenging, but it's certainly not impossible. And it's important.

Speaker 1 When experts look at the impact of the limited diet most of us eat in the West, they find it's harming our health and it's harming the planet's health.

Speaker 1 One of the main recommendations in a recent big report in the Lancet Medical Journal was that we need to eat a more biodiverse diet.

Speaker 2 So remember, Karen said there's between 20 and 80,000 edible products grown around the world. In the U.S., we sell on average maybe about 130 of these.

Speaker 2 But really, we Americans get most of our calories from about a dozen plants, most of them grains.

Speaker 1 We're eating less than 1% of all the things we could be eating. And that's a bad idea for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 1 For one, because our food system relies on so few crops, it's less resilient and more at risk from threats like climate change and pests and disease.

Speaker 2 And then there's our health. Plants have all sorts of important compounds in them.
You've probably heard that it's a good idea to eat a wide variety of colors of fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 2 The more diverse our diets, the better overall that diet is for our health.

Speaker 1 Then there's the ecological benefits. We are eating these foods, but other species are too, and different crops provide different habitats.

Speaker 1 Eating a whole range of fruits and vegetables is the environmentally better thing to do, and it helps growers.

Speaker 1 Their soil and pollinators will get a boost from all that biodiversity, and growing a wider variety of fruit and veg makes them less dependent on the market for commodity crops.

Speaker 2 All this is really important on a big scale, but at a personal level, it's also just more delicious and more fun.

Speaker 12 Eating is such an engaging thing on all different levels, and I just, I think it's so exciting.

Speaker 12 And so for us to be able to help others see it that way, I think is is great because we have customers who were, you know, I would say, very limited eaters.

Speaker 12 And over the years, I've gotten to know and they've become more explorers with food. And I think that brings a richness to their life.

Speaker 12 So I think there's an opportunity for us all to get more out of our life, like more pleasure and enjoyment by broadening. you know, what we taste and enjoy with food.

Speaker 3 They're going to try it. They're going to love it.
They're going to like the difference, the texture, the flavor, the versatility, and then, you know, we'll keep introducing new products.

Speaker 1 Thanks this episode to Karen Kaplan, who was fabulous and also fed us delicious fruits.

Speaker 1 You can spot the purple Frida's specialty produce stickers in the store, and we have links to their website online, as well as to Fear No Fruit, a documentary about Frida's made in 2015 by director Mark Brian Smith.

Speaker 1 And thanks also to strawberry breeder Steve Knapp for telling us about Frida.

Speaker 2 Thanks also to Air Muir of Clover Food Lab. Again, we have links on our website, gastropod.com.
We'll be back in just a week with a brand new episode.

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