She holds the tarantula in her palm. She breaks off one of its legs. "This," Frieda says, "is a pepper. From Nigeria. You crush it, and inside are these peppercorns."
Frieda rummages through another envelope. She holds up two lilliputian heads of garlic, each fully mature but only the size of a small brussels sprout. "These are from Nigeria, too," she says. "Aren't they adorable?"
When Frieda thinks something's going to be a hit, she says, "I feel it in my elbow." The company is small and nimble, the process of introducing new items refreshingly direct -- marketing done at treetop level. Go by the gut, then let it fly. It leaves the company perpetually in a test-marketing phase. As Karen puts it, "Test marketing and regular marketing are the same thing at Frieda's."
Consider the company's April 1988 introduction of the coquito, the tiny, coconutlike fruit of the chilean palm. A grower sent samples, hoping Frieda's would like them and order more. "We just put them in the kitchen on the shelf," Karen says. "We waited to see what people's reactions would be."
The staff fell in love with them. A produce buyer wanted to place an order as soon as he learned of them. Frieda's started promoting them to food editors and produce buyers. "Now, we can't get enough of them," Karen says, conceding, however, that some customers balk at the price -- about $6 retail for a six-ounce package.
Some fruits and vegetables dearly loved in their native cultures arrive at Frieda's test kitchen but just don't make the cut. The durian, for example, is treasured in Thailand. The sample sent to Frieda's had porcupinelike spines; inside, it had the aroma of a sewer on a hot day. "We cut it open, and -- you cannot imagine -- it just stank. It had this cheesy texture. When we threw it out, we took it all the way to the dumpster."
Frieda's elbow is not foolproof. Some products have been out-and-out failures. Her fruit-flavored fortune cookies bombed everywhere except Dallas, one of the few places where produce buyers could be persuaded to stock them. Some shoppers there, however, were rumored to have bought the cookies for their dogs. Colored walnuts also failed. Produce buyers refused to see either item as anything but a seasonal novelty.
But if colored nuts and fruit-flavored fortune cookies fail, why does this kiwano thing persist?
The kiwano is the Elephant Man of produce. The only things the kiwano shares with the kiwi are its New Zealand origins and three letters of the alphabet. It is a mottled orange, exactly the color of boiled lobster, and is covered with pointy horns that rise from its skin like spikes from the skull of a punk rocker. Cut it open and the view is no better. It is packed with masses of emerald-green seeds. At its best it tastes like cucumber soaked in lemon juice. Even the company's PR officer finds it hard to warm up to a kiwano. In a letter accompanying a shipment of three, she suggested using one as a paperweight.
Yet Dominick's Finer Foods, a 95-store chain of supermarkets in the Chicago area, sells 50 cases of kiwanos every week. Harold Alston of Stop & Shop admits it "tastes terrible," but his chain sells it, too.
Why?
Herein lies the Frieda trump, the card to play after all the other cards -- taste, nutrition -- have been retired.
"You sell the sizzle," says Karen. Or in this case, the horns.
The kiwano sells as a novelty, the fruit equivalent of a wax nose and mustache. Use it as a centerpiece. Scoop out the insides and fill the shell with something else, something good. Send a basket to the IRS. "If you want to have a dinner party and be a little exotic," says Alston, "that's the thing to put out there."
But he's got one last piece of advice. "Just don't sit on 'em."
* * *
Erik Larson is a San Francisco-based free-lance writer.
'WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?'
The Frieda's secret: give retailers and shoppers what they need
In the beginning there was the produce guy (and he was a guy), whose idea of marketing was bringing his broccoli to a store and putting it on a shelf. You want some? Fine. No? That's OK, too. If his stock got sold, he'd bring more. If not, he wouldn't.
Frieda Caplan, it might be argued, changed all that. For one thing, she employs an all-women sales force in a business in which wholesale buyers are male. More important, she decided she could exploit a produce industry niche -- specialty items -- and take steps to separate herself from the generic lot. She could offer not just mushrooms, but Frieda's mushrooms. And rather than simply throwing them on a shelf and waiting for customers to walk down the vegetable aisle, she realized she could actually market them.
The core of the company's marketing strategy? Add value to the products -- from the perspective of consumers and retailers alike. The company helps retailers to sell Frieda's products and to leverage specialty produce for greater storewide sales. And it offers consumers any information it can to help them enjoy Frieda's not-always-recognizable fruits and vegetables. Here are some of the company's value-adding tools:
HELPING CUSTOMERS
* Explanatory labels. When Frieda introduced kiwifruit, she developed posters and then labels that explained to shoppers what kiwi was and how it could be used. Now, such information is integrated into all her packaging.
* Correspondence. Every Frieda's Finest label invites shoppers to write for recipes and advice, and every letter gets a personal answer. Shoppers who complain get a full refund.
* Newsletter. The company publishes "Club Frieda," a free newsletter for any consumer who asks to be on the mailing list.
HELPING RETAILERS
* Seminars. Company officers offer free consulting services, critiquing stores and providing ideas in chainwide seminars.
* Product selection assistance. Frieda's produces a weekly "Hot Sheet" newsletter, which tells what's selling.
* Bulletins on display and demonstration. Frieda's does the thinking for store produce managers, providing them with product-specific strategies for merchandising.
* Advertising assistance. Promotion packages come with in-store merchandising aids and with camera-ready advertising materials for use in newspaper ads. -- The Editors
"Strange Fruits" by Erik Larson. Published in Inc. magazine, November 1989 issue. Copyright © 1989 by Erik Larson. All rights reserved.
