We have Chiquita brand bananas and Sunkist brand oranges. Why no Bugsy brand carrots?
The Chiquita web site has a long history of the company, but the only really relevant things are:
Other than that it says they organized a successful shipping mechanism and so on, which I guess gave them the idea that they might as well go ahead and give the produce name recognition. Okay, fine. But why hasn’t that same thing happened to every other fruit and/or veggie? What makes bananas especially deserving of a brand name?
Of course, every veggie gets a brand name (DelMonte, for instance) on it when it goes through processing & into a freezer bag or a can, but that’s the name of the canning company, right? They do that because they put all that work into the processing, right?
So why does the Jolly Green Giant stamp his seal of approval on canned green beans but he’s nowhere to be found in the produce section? You’d think he would want his name on fresh produce, rather than canned or frozen.
But I do recall reading that consumers have a lot less brand loyalty for produce than other substances. Fewer than 25% of people buy frozen vegetables on the basis of the company, and the quality of that produce is likely much more consistent than the vegetables rotting on the shelf. You would only want your company name associated with the freshest produce.
Still, you do see brandf name salads and on some vegetables here; if you consider “Hellhole Farms, Spittleville” to be a sort of brand name. And I never have seen it on broccoli, but I have seen it on that broccoli-cauliflower hybrid. I hope I never do. It reminds me of that Herman cartoon where lettuce is only sold in packages of ten.
Attrayant I’m assuming that you botched your link for the Chiquita site?? Even though Barbara Mikkelson is actually the top banana at snopes, and she’s definitely got a lot of ap-peal, I assume you were aiming for Chiquita as a site for the company history?
It’s ALL brand-name broccoli (well, 90%). I read an article in a Japanese newspaper about one seed farmer in Japan who produces 90% of the broccoli seed in the world. He’s the one big brand name, it’s all his specific strain of broccoli.
Actually, Bugs Bunny is associated with a brand of baby carrots. If you look in a supermarket you might see bundles of single serving-sized containers of baby carrots with his likeness on them. I don’t know what the actual brand name is though.
LOS ANGELES (Reuter) / June 28, 1996 – Legendary filmmaker Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who brought James Bond to life on the big screen and produced 17 box-office hits based on the British superspy’s exploits, has died. He was 87.
Descended from Italian horticulturists who crossed the cauliflower with rabe to create a vegetable that bears the family name, Broccoli will go down in history himself as the mastermind behind the hugely successful Bond franchise.
Bananas and oranges are simple to label, they can easily be stickered. Most produce, however, is not marketed in a way so that a company can get a brand logo. If you want brand carrots, as mentioned earlier, get them in a bag. They’re always branded then.
Furthermore, most produce is very seasonal, with crops coming from different areas every few weeks. That makes it difficult for 1 or 2 labels to dominate the market.
Another value of branding is that a customer can expect to get the same thing every time. That’s not really possible with much fresh produce. The broccoli from 1 area can be very different from another. Weather changes cause big fluctuations in price and quality. These are no-nos when it comes to branding. If customers can’t expect the sameness that comes with a brand name, then it ceases to mean very much.
In different areas of the country (and outside the country) different varieties of the same produce are grown to match with conditions of the area. You’re most always getting Cavandish bananas. Oranges are generally either navels or valencias. But with most other produce you’re getting slightly different varieties and much different quality. Branding problems are greatly increased.
If you can’t easily label it and you can’t guarantee that the brand label would mean anything, then why brand label it?
Double & triple checked that and still messed up a link. :mad:
Anywho, with regard to a brand name keeping the quality of the product uniform, I have seen wide variations between bananas (all of which were Chiquitas :)) and yet, you can get a bunch (har!) of no name bananas and put them right next to chiquitas and be hard pressed to tell the difference.
I maintain: without the sticker, nobody would know the difference. Not even Chiquita herself.
Oh, absolutely, it’s nothing but marketing hype. I just read Bananas : An American History by Virginia Scott Jenkins and it was perfectly fascinating. I checked it out of the library, but amazon.com has it.
She says, among other things, that bananas actually keep longer in the refrigerator, but back in the 1950s (60s?), the two big banana companies deliberately started a PR campaign to “educate” housewives on the proper storage of bananas. “Bananas will keep longer at room temperature,” we were told, which is a complete fabrication, since even the growers and the wholesalers keep them refrigerated so they’ll last longer. But this way the housewife’s bananas spoil faster, necessitating the purchase of more bananas, sooner.
Oops, I forgot to say, they keep longer under refrigeration although their skins do turn black at about the same time as a banana kept on the counter. But inside, the refrigerated banana is perfectly fine, not all mushy.
I thought Broccoli WAS the brand name for “little green trees”. ‘cause I don’t run aroun eating just any ol’ little green trees. Thye gotta be Broccoli brand.
Damn.
And just where does that word “Broccoli” come from? I mean, it sounds like a variation of food poisoning. “Hey, my buddy got sick from e-coli.” “Oh yeah, that ain’t nuttin’ compared to the Broc-coli my brother came down with. He was shittin’ green for a month.”
Broccoli w/cheese and broccoli with butta. Umm-Umm good.
I’ve often bought the AndyBoy brand of broccoli. They mark their name on the little rubber band that’s used to secure two or three individual heads into one bundle. This ain’t a hybrid like Duck Duck Goose or Dr_Paprika are talking about, it’s just plain old broccoli.
I realize that this answers the letter of the OP, but not the spirit. As an added piece of information, my local supermarket sometimes has AndyBoy broccoli and sometimes has an unbranded variety. I assume that means that consumers aren’t out in force demanding their AndyBoy, and so consumer indifference is the main reason behind nameless produce.
Or, another hypothesis: Maybe there are no broccoli growers large enough to guarantee a 52-weeks-a-year supply, like Chaquita can do. It’d be hard to justify spending money on encouraging brand loyalty if consumers can’t find your product half the time.
