FRESHCONOMICS — The Podcast of the Fresh Produce Business

One of any retailer’s central obsessions is getting people through the door. This is what the trade calls “footfall” , the frequency with which customers visit the store. The underlying theory is disarmingly simple: if we can just get you inside, you will end up buying something . And probably quite a lot of something. Many strategies exist to achieve this, and one of the most powerful is the Loss...

Quite some time ago I remember reading a viral tweet from an American dentist that made me laugh out loud. If I recall properly, the dentist was sarcastically replying to the typical press story of: “9 out of 10 dentists recommend…” . The dentist said something along the lines of: “I’ve been in this profession for 20 years and nobody has ever asked me anything… and the thing is, I talk to my colle...

Today I want to talk to you about something that sounds like a contradiction: the idea that our greatest weakness, as a sector, is also our greatest strength . To get there, I’m going to use a few concepts borrowed from operations management, economics and even a little bit of physics: efficacy versus efficiency, supply-driven versus demand-driven industries, Just-in-Time, Lean Management, Kanban,...

For this episode, let me give you a preview of the topics I’m going to talk about: commoditisation, economies of scale, standardisation, critical mass, logistics, efficiency, intensive distribution, technology, breeding, deseasonalisation, convenience, innovation , and much more. All of those terms are ingredients of something we call strategically aligned global chains , and to explain it I’m goi...

Who really rules a market? Who really rules an industry or a society. We usually answer without thinking too hard:  the majority rules!  The big consumer rules. The big buyer rules. The retail chain that moves millions rules. And yet, every time I look closely at how decisions are actually made along the fresh produce value chain , I run into the same uncomfortable surprise: very often the one who...

In German there is a word, Schadenfreude , which roughly translates as “ joy at someone else’s harm ”. It refers to the pleasure one feels at watching another person suffer or fail. Friends, don’t do it. It’s not nice. Especially in our business. I know that some of our competitors can become actually insufferable, and when they get hit with bad harvests or wiped out by pests, we can’t help feelin...

It is time to take on another one of those topics that is both a curse and a blessing. Let’s talk about promotions . Needless to say we usually talk about promotions in general, as if all types of promotions were all the same thing. The retailer asks for a promotion, we run a promotion, the supermarket flyer goes out, the pallets are shipped at a lower price, and we move on to the next week. But b...

I have spoken already in previous episodes about the difficulty, in our business, of building knowledge through experience. Because of volatility, what worked yesterday is no longer useful today . I often use the example of rain. Sometimes it rains and it causes us a quality problem or a loss of crop, and other times it rains, exactly the same, and absolutely nothing happens. That’s why this busin...

There are words we use so often in this business that, by the sheer act of repetition, they end up meaning nothing at all. We pass them around in meetings and on calls as if everyone agreed on what they referred to, and only when someone places a particular example on the table do we realise that each of us was holding a different definition in our head. “Specialty” is, without a doubt, one of tho...

I'm afraid we are witnessing a breach of the social contract that was struck between society and farmers at the founding moment of the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962, following the Treaty of Rome of 1957 . When the CAP was founded, it was built around the objectives of cheap, abundant and safe food, with European preference, and, in return, an income guarantee for farmers . Well, none of t...

There is a word we keep repeating in the fresh produce business, almost without realising it. A word we inherited from textbooks, from conferences, from our business professors who told us that our fruits and vegetables were just another example of the agricultural economic model. The word, of course, is “commodity” . And if I had to pick one idea from my book Freshconomics that I would like to sh...

Gregory King was a pioneer of economic science. He was the first to document how volatility in production affects prices more than proportionally. How a small change in the available quantity of a crop can send prices through the roof . I suppose that what we now call King’s Law is intuitive for some people, but it wasn’t for me. Perhaps because the modern world -especially in developed countries-...

What truly drives the fresh produce business? If you come from a marketing background (like I do), your gut will say “ demand ”. If you were trained in any business school (as I was), you will talk about understanding the consumer . And if you’ve worked at a consulting firm advising food companies (like I have), you will probably recommend building your entire strategy around what people want to b...

Not everything was going to come straight from the book. This is the first episode we go off-topic. In any case, this episode picks up a story that, I think, is little known: " the birth of the Sicilian Mafia due to the cultivation of lemons" . Yes, I know it sounds unbelievable but fruits and vegetables are behind a many extraordinary stories like this one or, to name another, the case...

Quality control in the fresh produce business is one of the most misleadingly complex activities you can imagine. On paper, it seems straightforward: learn the regulations, understand the specifications, measure the tolerances. In practice, it becomes a philosophical journey into the nature of perception , value, and what we truly mean when we say something is "good enough". Today, I wan...

As you already know from the previous episodes, over the past years I have been collecting, writing, rewriting and drafting texts to complete a book dedicated to the fruit and vegetable sector . A book that is both a text about the fresh produce business and a strange kind of autobiography of my endeavours in the industry. This is because much of the content is the fruit of conversations and perso...

For this episode, I want to focus on one fundamental concept: the FRESHMARKET. And notice I didn't say we're going to talk about the "fresh produce market" in general, because I'm trying to establish a very specific term, The FRESHMARKET, to describe something quite different from what you might expect. That somewhere between the farm and your shopping cart exists an invisibl...

And this is where a new adventure begins. An adventure that actually started many years ago when I launched a blog under my name ( daviddelpino.com ) and dedicated to the world of fresh produce . I did it when blogs were already an almost outdated form of communication. The reception from the fruit and vegetable industry was surprising. The following and respect over the many years of blogging enc...