Alex Stetsenko

Pretty interesting and insightful article from Washington Post how baby carrots reshaped carrot industry back in 1980s: Baby carrots are not baby carrots.

Just cutting carrots into 2-inch pieces made so much difference that baby carrots are now responsible for almost 70% of all carrot sales. Not to mention more than doubled per capita consumption of carrots between 1985 and 1997.

Some notable quotes:

At first, Yurosek used a potato peeler, which didn’t quite work because the process was too laborious. But then he bought an industrial green-bean cutter. The machine cut the carrots into uniform 2-inch pieces, the standard baby carrot size that persists today.

In 1987, the year after Yurosek’s discovery, carrot consumption jumped by almost 30 percent, according to data from the USDA. By 1997, the average American was eating roughly 14 pounds of carrots per year, 117 percent more than a decade earlier. The baby carrot doubled carrot consumption.

What’s more, moving the peeling process to the factory has allowed the carrot industry to make use of the scraps that used to end up in people’s trash bins.