In case you didn’t know, baby carrots aren’t babies at all:
They’re grown-up carrots cut into 2-inch sections, pumped through water-filled pipes into whirling cement-mixer-size peelers and whittled down to the niblets Americans know, love and scarf down by the bagful.
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The miniatures — the brainchild of a California farmer tired of discarding imperfect vegetables — have taken a steadily larger market share and now make up a third of sales of fresh carrots, says Philipp Simon, a plant breeder and geneticist who directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s vegetable breeding program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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It all began about 16 years ago when Mike Yurosek of Newhall, Calif., got tired of seeing 400 tons of carrots a day drop down the cull shoot at his packing plant in Bakersfield. Culls are carrots that are too twisted, knobby, bent or broken to sell. In some loads, as many as 70% of carrots were tossed. And there are only so many discarded carrots you can feed to a pig or a steer, says Yurosek, now 82 and retired. “After that, their fat turns orange,” he says.
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California’s Central Valley is dotted with farms, fruit and vegetable processors, and freezing plants. Yurosek knew full well that freezers routinely cut up his long, well-shaped carrots into cubes, coins and mini-carrots. “If they can do that, why can’t we, and pack ‘em fresh?” he wondered.First he had to cut the culls into something small enough to make use of their straight parts. “The first batch we did, we did in a potato peeler and cut them by hand,” Yurosek says. Then he found a frozen-food company that was going out of business and bought an industrial green-bean cutter, which just happened to cut things into 2-inch pieces. Thus was born the standard size for a baby carrot.
Next, Yurosek sent one of his workers to a packing plant and loaded the cut-up carrots into an industrial potato peeler to take off the peel and smooth down the edges. What he ended up with was a little rough but still recognizable as the baby carrot of today.
After a bit of practice and an investment in some bagging machinery, he called one of his best customers, a Vons supermarket in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘I’m sending you some carrots to see what you think.’ Next day they called and said, ‘We only want those.’ “
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.
Today, these babies come from one place: Bakersfield, Calif. The state produces almost three-quarters of U.S. carrots because of its favorable climate and deep, not-too-heavy soil. Every day, somewhere in the state, carrots are either being planted or harvested — last year to the tune of 20 million pounds, says Jerry Munson of the Fresh Carrot Advisory Board.