In the produce business, verbal commitments are as firm as contracts -- produce dies too quickly and prices change too rapidly for buyers and wholesalers to waste time signing and delivering written documents. Frieda hustled, pleaded, and cajoled to secure adequate supplies from growers. In some instances, she loaded her new baby, Karen, into her station wagon, drove to the mushroom farms, helped pack the mushrooms, then delivered them herself.
On April 2, 1962, Frieda opened her own business at the 7th Street Market, specializing in mushrooms. She called it Produce Specialties Inc. and hung a sign with black letters printed on a background of purple, the only color her sign painter happened to have on hand. The color became her trademark. She changed the company name to Frieda's Finest/Produce, Specialties Inc. and recently changed the labels to read Frieda's of California.
Frieda built the company in classic niche-finding fashion; she took on business that mainstream wholesalers turned away. Accustomed to big volume sales, they weren't set up to market exotics. Growers with novel items had nowhere to go. Frieda welcomed them. "What we've always done is put ourselves in a position where we heard things first," she says. "A lot of people couldn't be bothered. We got a lot of ideas by default."
Her cardinal rule: "Always have an open door; always listen to what anyone has to offer."
She listened one day when a Safeway produce buyer paid her a visit. That moment changed American cuisine.
The buyer asked if she'd ever heard of a fruit called the Chinese gooseberry. A Safeway customer had asked about it. Frieda had never seen one but promised to keep an eye out. Six months later, by sheer coincidence, a broker stopped by and offered her a load of Chinese gooseberries.
She called the Safeway buyer, then set out to see if anyone else would be interested in the fuzzy, green, wholly appealing little fruit. In a purple blaze of optimism, she ordered 240 10-pound cases. Over the next four very painful months, she tried to unload them. In the process, she says, she learned some invaluable lessons about the marketing of produce specialties.
She also learned that kiwis have a long shelf life.
What the fruit needed, Frieda decided, was some good PR. She gave the gooseberry a new name, one suggested by a broker at the market: kiwifruit, derived from kiwi, the name of a New Zealand bird and the nickname New Zealanders use to describe themselves. She convinced Vickman's -- a popular produce-district restaurant -- to make a kiwi pastry and persuaded produce buyers to display kiwis in their stores. She developed posters that explained to shoppers what a kiwi was and how it could be used. In retrospect, this seems the most obvious of steps. At the time, it was a path-breaking idea.
Frieda impressed one influential retailer, Dick Gladden, the retired president of Alpha-Beta Stores Inc., who was then the chain's director of produce operations. To help Frieda entice shoppers to try this new fruit, he sold it at or below his own cost. "To be honest with you, I really liked Frieda," he says. "She was a female at the produce market when there weren't any. She was down there at one or two o'clock every morning, working her tail off."
Frieda also persuaded California growers to give the fruit room in their fields, and in 1971 she introduced the first domestic kiwi. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a new breed of hip, nontraditional chefs likewise discovered the kiwi. The business took off and has yet to peak. "We call the kiwi our 18-year overnight success story," Frieda says.
Of the lessons taught by the kiwi, the most fundamental was this: once a specialty becomes well accepted by consumers, it ceases to be a specialty. As demand for kiwi grew, growers around the world began planting it, glutting the market and turning it into a commodity. Frieda's still sells kiwis, but it isn't the money-maker it once was; the company can't compete against the bulk wholesalers now dominating the kiwi business. The same thing happened with fresh mushrooms. Although Frieda's still sells the exotic varieties, the company halted sales of common mushrooms in 1981. "We breed our own competition," Frieda says. "We know if something takes off, we'll only have the franchise on that business for a limited period of time."
The kiwi also underscored the crucial need to win the hearts and minds of produce buyers -- more crucial even than courting the shoppers themselves, whom Frieda believes to be far more adventuresome. "The single key to success is the produce man in the store," Frieda says. "Unless he's convinced, specialties haven't got a chance."
But how do you convince him? Especially when, as is sometimes the case, he may not make a dime from selling your product?
The cup on Karen Caplan's desk says: The Boss. A Dale Carnegie devotee, she talks in terms of DBMs (dominant buying motives) and PIs (primary interests). She also studies neuro-linguistic programming: the audio, visual, and kinesthetic characteristics of people. In assessing her own personality, using a personality-profiling technique called Performax, she describes herself as results-oriented, aggressive, pioneering, bold, inspiring, and a host of other exhausting traits. She is the Sigourney Weaver of the alien vegetable business. "Nothing's tough," she says, eyes large and frank. "Things do not faze me. I can sell anything."
Something Karen does must work. When she became president, sales were $11 million. In the three and a half years since, the company's sales have increased by more than 60%. She wants her salespeople, all Dale Carnegie graduates, to analyze the buyers they talk to, learn what makes them tick. If a client's PI is to look good to his boss, make him look good; if her DBM is to get out of the office early, help her do so. She employs an all-women sales staff. She asks, "If you were a buyer, would you rather talk to a woman or a man?"
This psycho-emphasis aside, however, the company takes practical steps to overcome the balkiness of buyers. Karen personally conducts retail supermarket seminars for produce buyers and managers in cities around the country, first touring and inspecting their stores, then candidly critiquing them in open assemblies. She lectures, too, on produce theory -- how having more variety and better displays draws customers to a store and boosts the store's overall profit, if not the profit of the department itself. A major goal of the company's marketing strategy is to position Frieda's as the authority on the subject of specialty produce. "We not only sell specialty items," Karen says. "We counsel produce managers on how to be successful."
