Musings from the CU Suite

Written by Anthony Demangone

My wife loves baby carrots. I wouldn't say I love them, but I prefer them to adult carrots. 

Adult carrots are simply too big. That's a lot of chewing. And by the end of an adult carrot, I'm pretty much done with carrots for a while.

But baby carrots? They are perfect. Just the right size for a snack, and no waste. 

Imagine my shock to learn that baby carrots are not little carrots waiting to grow up. Rather, they are regular carrots that are peeled and shaped into the small "baby carrot" we all recognize today.

I really thought they were young carrots. I obviously married up.

It turns out, though, that the baby carrot may be one of the coolest innovations I've heard from in a while. 

So, how did they come about? A great deal of frustration. It turns out that carrot farmers used to throw out up to 70 percent of their crop each year. Why? Ugly carrots don't sell. 

Mike Yurosek, who came up with the invention, had been thinking about this problem for years. In a fantastic article from Priceonomics.com, comes the story.

Then, in 1986, he had an idea. Frozen food processors chopped up their vegetables, including carrots, before freezing them. Pea-sized carrot cubes tossed in with peas. Crinkly-cut carrot coins. This was partially because a solid frozen carrot is a pretty inconvenient item -- it would take forever to thaw. But Yurosek also realized this meant frozen food processors got away with using irregular produce. "If they can do that,” he thought, “Why can't we, and pack 'em fresh?"

He got to work prototyping. The first batch he tossed into an industrial potato peeler, and then sliced up by hand. When a local frozen foods processor was going out of business, he got a deal on their old green bean cutter, which was made to clip green beans down into smaller pieces. He found that one of the most aesthetic cuts was to put them through the green bean cutter first, and then through the potato peeler. The result was a 2-inch, skin-free, slightly rounded stub of carrot -- a close cousin to the baby carrot of today. (Baby carrots are also sometimes called “baby cut carrots” in order to distinguish them from carrots that are literally immature or naturally dwarf.)

Then he sent a batch of the babies off to his best customer, a supermarket in Los Angeles. From a USA Today interview with Yurosek:

"I said, 'I'm sending you some carrots to see what you think.' Next day they called and said, 'We only want those.'"

Thus, the baby carrot was born.

The innovation took something that was thrown away, and created a new product that had a higher profit margin and lead to the consumption of more carrots. 

It is simply amazing. A similar story is told about the chicken wing, which also once was thrown away before turning into the foundation of many sports bars.  (Smithsonian.)

It gets you thinking...is there something that credit unions have that we simply throw out? Something that has immense value?

The only thing that comes to mind is member data. We know where our members travel, what they purchase, where they go, what brand of gasoline they purchase, and more.  Well, we likely don't know these things. But we have access to all the data through debit and credit transactions. 

If we could find a way to harvest and organize that data, what new value could we create? 

I'll leave that to the folks who didn't think that baby carrots were little, young carrots. 

It is something to chew on, though. (See what I did there. Baby carrots? Chew?  Boy, I'm ready for Friday.)