Strange Fruits

How Frieda's Finest established a brand name in an industry that had never had one

Frieda Caplan, chairman and founder of Frieda's Finest, has grown a celebrated and thriving company in an industry otherwise known for being both dull and brutal -- the business of selling produce. In a field dominated by generic products and devoid of attention to marketing, she's created a brand identity and persuaded millions of Americans to buy fruits and vegetables they had never heard of. How? -- E.L.

The business of selling fruits and vegetables is tough enough, what with fickle weather, prices that change daily, and wholesale markets that open around midnight. For Frieda Caplan, it gets tougher still. Frieda, as she is known in gustatory circles, is the founder and chairman of Frieda's Finest, a pioneering marketer of exotic fruits and vegetables. In addition to all the usual pitfalls, she must cope with the inherent weirdness of the things she sells: taro root, poisonous in its raw state; passion fruit, best eaten at its blackest and ugliest; and kiwano, the strangest-looking melon ever to land on U.S. shores.

And Frieda has to deal with the likes of talk-show host David Letterman. One night she appeared on his show with a kiwano among her sampler of exotic produce. Frieda sliced the kiwano, and Letterman took a bite. Hunching suddenly at the shoulders, kiwano debris slipping from his mouth, he proclaimed to millions of late-night television watchers everywhere, "That's damn near inedible."

Despite such hazards, Frieda managed to hook America on weird stuff -- or what had seemed weird until she came along. In the 1960s, when most grocery stores sold only canned mushrooms, she helped turn the fresh variety into a national staple. Next she "discovered" the Chinese gooseberry, renamed it the kiwifruit, and helped create a new, global industry. For better or worse, she's introduced spaghetti squash and alfalfa sprouts to the U.S. market. Someday, perhaps, the blood oranges she sells will become the citrus fruit of choice in U.S. homes, and coquitos -- marble-size, mature coconuts -- the all-American lunch-box treat.

"How," asked Fred Ferretti in a column in Gourmet magazine, "can one possibly do without Frieda?"

Her success is a classic example of what happens when an entrepreneur arrives from outside the pale, bringing new ideas to an industry that had always done things its own way. She describes her company as a "market expander." Relying on instinct, simple marketing tools, and her own willingness to keep an open mind, Frieda has taken shoppers and grocers for a 25-year walk on the wild side. Hers was the first small company to brand-label all its fruits and vegetables and did so, moreover, in bright purple. Her four trucks are trimmed in purple; a big purple heart adorns her headquarters and warehouse on 20th Street in an otherwise gritty part of downtown Los Angeles. By courting and coddling the press, Frieda turned herself into a celebrity, the Kiwi Queen. She may be the only produce executive who's been photographed by both People magazine and National Geographic. She was television's original Green Grocer until a legal squabble forced her to pick a new name. Although Frieda's Finest expects revenues this year of only $20 million, the company gets mentioned in the same breath with industry giants.

"She understands publicity completely," says Ralph M. Pinkerton, a marketing consultant in Newport Beach, Calif. Says James Prevor, publisher of Produce Business magazine, "She recognized early on that as a small company she could not compete with the media budgets of the Doles and Chiquitas, but that because of the nature of the items she had, she did have the potential to generate excitement and news coverage."

Frieda virtually invents vegetables. One example: in 1983 a distributor called to say his supply of acorn squash had come in too small, only baseball size. Frieda knew that consumers had gone wild for other so-called baby vegetables. Why not baby squash? She asked for samples and found them delicious. The grower's irrigation system, she learned, had failed at an ideal point in the growing cycle. She convinced other farmers to simulate those growing conditions. In the spring of 1986 her company sold 4,000 cases of the dwarf inventions.

"To be a successful marketer of any kind, you have to be totally open to weird new concepts," Frieda says, sitting at a table in the small garden behind her headquarters. She is at this instant a living logo. Her purple dress blazes in the California sun. She is wearing purple-and-white earrings and a purple pin; she's got a purple marker in her hand and carries a purple cup, filled only with hot water. Behind her, African daisies bloom. In purple. "Just because something hasn't been done before," she says, "doesn't mean you shouldn't do it."

But the kiwano? Has Frieda at last gone too far?

Frieda herself, now 66, has always been an exotic. She founded Frieda's back in 1962, pre-Lib America. Then as now, produce was essentially an all-male industry. Her daughters, Karen Caplan, 34, president since 1986, and Jackie Caplan Wiggins, 31, vice-president for national accounts, say Frieda's being a woman and therefore an outsider may help explain why she hit on so innovative an approach to produce marketing. Produce Business's James Prevor says her gender had a certain PR value as well. "Just the fact that she's a woman in a man's business made her different," he says. "It made her stand out from the beginning."

A contributing factor to Frieda's success has been the national trend toward more variety in grocers' produce departments. In the early 1970s supermarkets stocked an average of 65 different produce items, according to the Produce Marketing Association, in Newark, Del. Today the average is 200, with some so-called superstores carrying up to 375. Some produce managers buy exotic fruits and vegetables as much for their image appeal as for their marketability. "We don't make any money in exotics," says Harold Alston, vice-president of produce sales and procurement at Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos., one of Frieda's major customers. "We never did. We probably throw 50% of it away, and when we do get our money back, we're real happy. But it goes toward that total image as the store that carries everything. I could advertise for six months and never get the image we get just from having somebody walk in and see all these wild items."

Frieda discovered her entrepreneurial skill in 1957, when she was left on her own for two weeks to watch over the Giumarra Brothers wholesale business, one of the scores of produce suppliers that operate out of Los Angeles's three block-long wholesale markets. A buyer for a major chain asked Frieda, then only a clerk, if she'd be able to supply enough fresh mushrooms to support a Thanksgiving advertisement the chain planned to run. Although fresh mushrooms were a specialty and accounted for only a tiny share of Giumarra's sales, Frieda blithely said yes. She was unaware that demand for fresh mushrooms peaked at Thanksgiving, when supplies were most limited.