Baby carrots sprout new U.S. eating habits

By Elizabeth Weise
USA Today

Baby carrots have overtaken the nation like a healthful tsunami, an orange tide that is sliding into grocery carts, pooling on dinner plates and lapping into minivans full of snack-hungry kids.

A farmer sick of discarding mal-formed carrots came up with the idea for making baby carrots. Advertiser library photo • Aug. 13, 2004

And when the nation's schoolchildren return to classes, many moms — hoping to weasel at least one fresh vegetable into their child's day — will drop a bag of the tiny carrots into lunch bags.

But there's a twist in this beta-carotene success story: Baby carrots aren't babies at all. They're grown-up carrots cut into two-inch sections, pumped through water-filled pipes into whirling cement-mixer-size peelers and whittled down to the niblets Americans know and love. "I was shocked when I first discovered that," says Jeanne Ambrose, a food and entertainment editor at Better Homes and Gardens. "I'd wondered how they got them all so perfectly matched to grow all the exact same shape and size."

The miniatures — the brainchild of a California farmer tired of discarding imperfect vegetables — have taken a steadily larger market share and now make up a third of fresh carrot sales, says Philipp Simon, a plant breeder and geneticist who directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture's vegetable breeding program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The popularity of low-carb diets has taken a toll on carrot consumption in recent years, but Americans still are eating a lot more carrots each year than their parents did. In the 1960s, the average American ate more than 6 pounds of carrots a year; today we eat almost 10 1/2 pounds — a bright spot in a national diet that's often short on vegetables.

"I think (the public has) pretty much adopted them as a snack food. They eat them raw. They're in convenient single-serving packages, which makes them easy to take to work or lunch or soccer games," Ambrose says.

"Often people just want something to munch on and carrots are a great alternative to a calorie-laden pastry or treat," says Walter Willett, a nutrition professor at Harvard University.

Baby carrots have remade the carrot. It's not just that Americans are eating more of them — the carrots themselves are better. Consumer demand has pushed carrot producers to take the sometimes bitter, sometimes woody carrot and breed it into a crisp, sweet powerhouse.

An idea germinates

Yurosek has always been a "think outside the carrot patch" kind of guy. In the 1960s, his company, Yurosek and Sons, was selling carrots in a plastic bag with a Bunny-Luv logo, a cartoon that got the farmers in trouble with Warner Bros., protective of its Bugs Bunny brand.

Instead of bringing in lawyers, Yurosek recalls, "I said to my wife — she's a pretty good drawer — 'Hey, draw me up about 50 bunnies, would you? Then we'll send 'em to Warner Brothers and ask "them" to tell "us" which ones we can use.' "

The entertainment giant picked one, and Bunny-Luv lived on.

The farmer continued growing — and throwing out — carrots for decades. But in 1986 Yurosek had the idea that would change the munching habits of America.

California's Central Valley is dotted with farms, fruit and vegetable processors and freezing plants. Yurosek knew full well that freezers routinely cut up his long, well-shaped carrots into cubes, coins and mini-carrots. "If they can do that, why can't we, and pack 'em fresh?" he wondered.

First he had to cut the culls into something small enough to make use of their straight parts. "The first batch we did, we did in a potato peeler and cut them by hand," Yurosek says.

Then he found a frozen-food company that was going out of business and bought an industrial green-bean cutter, which just happened to cut things into two-inch pieces. Thus was born the standard size for a baby carrot.

Next, Yurosek sent one of his workers to a packing plant and loaded the cut-up carrots into an industrial potato peeler to take off the peel and smooth down the edges. What he ended up with was a little rough but still recognizable as the baby carrot of today.

After a bit of practice and an investment in bagging machinery, he called one of his best customers, a Vons supermarket in Los Angeles. "I said, 'I'm sending you some carrots to see what you think.' Next day they called and said, 'We only want those.' "

The babies were an economic powerhouse. Stores paid 10 cents a bag for whole carrots and sold them for 17 cents. They paid 50 cents for a one-pound package of baby carrots and sold them for a dollar. By 1989, more markets were on board, and the baby carrot juggernaut had begun.

California orange

Today, these babies come from one place: California. The state produces almost three-quarters of U.S. carrots because of its favorable climate and deep, not-too-heavy soil. Every day, somewhere in the state, carrots are either being planted or harvested — last year to the tune of 20 million pounds, says Jerry Munson of the Fresh Carrot Advisory Board.

Which is why Bakersfield, Calif., is home to the nation's top two carrot processors, Grimm-

way Farms and Bolthouse Farms. In the early 1990s, Yurosek sold his company to rival Grimmway. The Bunny-Luv logo is still found on Grimmway's organic carrots. Yurosek's grandson Derek is Bolthouse's director of agricultural operations at Bakersfield's other carrot producer, Bolthouse.

An 18-karat vegetable

Minis — what they're called in the industry — have brought about a carrot-breeding revolution, says the USDA's Simon, who also teaches horticulture at the University of Wisconsin.

Carrots originally were sold in bulk, straight from the farm. The first advance was the "cello" carrot. Introduced in the 1950s, these were washed and sold in new-fangled (at the time) cellophane bags. "Cello carrots had to look like a carrot, and that was enough," Simon says.

Enter the baby carrot. Suddenly carrots were "branded." Instead of just carrots, they were Bunny-Luv or Bolthouse or Grimmway carrots. Consumers could remember the name and if they got a bad carrot they wouldn't buy that particular brand. Breeders got to work, getting rid of woodiness and bitterness. They also bred for length, smoothness and a cylindrical quality that lets processors clip off as little of the tip as possible.

Balancing these with the desirable sweetness and juiciness is a delicate task, says Simon. The faintly bitter taste is essential to what makes a carrot taste like a carrot. "I've had carrots that have more of a flavor note of peas or corn," he says.

Get the carrot too juicy and it breaks in the field. "There are some carrot varieties so succulent they're amazing, but they're like glass," he says.

None of this was done with fancy genetic engineering. "You just grow lots of carrots and look at them and taste them," says Simon. Breeders started experimenting with seed from varieties culled in the past for being too long to fit into the plastic bag.

"Prior to baby carrots, the ideal length for a carrot was somewhere between six and seven inches," Simon says. Now they're typically eight inches long, a "three-cut" that can make three two-inch babies. And breeders are edging toward even longer carrots. "You make it a four-cut and you've got a 33 percent yield increase," Simon says.