"Baby" Carrots

When you go to the supermarket to pick out some tomatoes, or onions, or carrots, which ones do you pick? I'm sure, like me, you pick the roundest, brightest ones with no apparent bruises or disfiguration. And this all makes sense if you've ever gotten home to find that your onion is bruised on the inside, rotten, and no good for your famous goulash recipe. But if everyone's picking out their vegetables that way, what's happening to the ones that are bruised and disfigured?

Everyday, thousands of tons of produce are discarded at supermarkets, and what's more, thousands more are discarded before they even make it to the supermarket. Probably millions.

So, imagine this, you're a California carrot farmer with 400 acres of land devoted to carrots and other supermarket produce and everyday, 2500 tons of carrots are harvested, but only 2100 are sold. The other 400 tons are simply tossed out because they're bruised, or discolored, or not straight and pointy. That's 800,000 pounds daily!

Mike Yurosek couldn't take it anymore, so he invented the "baby carrot." Mother Nature invented the baby carrot, but he invented the "baby carrot." Note the quotation marks. In 1986, Mr. Yurosek used an industrial green bean cutter to trim his unusable adult carrots to two-inch lengths. From there, the carrots were removed to an industrial potato peeler, where they were peeled and whittled down to the nubs pictured above.

"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 1-pound package of baby carrots and sold them for $1. By 1989, more markets were on board, and the baby-carrot juggernaut had begun." - USA Today 8/11/04

Now they're everywhere. People take them to work as a snack, they're served on airlines, they're in kids lunchboxes. When, as a whole, Americans are eating worse than they were forty years ago, we eat 67% more carrots than we did in the 60s, and that has quite a bit to do with the "baby carrot" phenomenon.

Mr. Yurosek, who died of cancer three years ago, is credited with changing the entire carrot industry. And from the articles I read, he was a charitable man with strong ties to his community. His Bunny-Luv brand continues on.