http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/2012/03/the-shape-of-fruits-to-come/

March 16, 2012
The Shape of Fruits to Come
Posted By: Sarah C. Rich


Original image from the Library of Congress

For the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at the rise of the seedless mandarin—a phenomenon fueled largely by consumer demand for convenience, in food as in everything else. Mandarins score high marks for marketability at a time when convenience is often at odds with health. Like packaged snacks, mandarins come in small, portable servings, have an easily removable wrapper, and taste sweet. But unlike most snacks, they are good for you. In fact, that old Kix slogan from 1978, “Kid-tested, mother-approved,” would be much more at home today on a bag of mandarins than on almost any cereal box.

While mandarins are natural, in the sense that they grow on trees planted in soil, the popular varieties sold in the supermarket are the product of decades of human intervention. In other words: they are heavily designed. Even those that are revered among the gourmand set emerged at one time from an agricultural research facility; the fruits are considered natural to the extent that time has allowed us to forget the human intervention that went into their creation. The newest varieties are bred to be seedless, above all, and impervious to becoming seeded through that fundamental process of biology known as pollination. (“Know why Cuties are seedless? Because kids hate seeds!”) And of course they need to be easy on the eyes. The ones that are too pale, too bumpy, too big or too rough get weeded out.

Once all the desirable traits are achieved in a single variety, each grower needs to distinguish itself—and if everyone’s selling the same thing, that distinction must be made through what surrounds the fruit. Packaging is creeping into the one section of the grocery store where formerly it was scarce. Citrus and potatoes used to be laid out in bulk piles by retail buyers, who eyed dazzling packinghouse logos behind the swinging door of their shop, then removed the fruit from its branded container for in-store display. Now, discerning shoppers know a Cutie from a Delite (same mandarin variety, different vertically-integrated company), a Tasteful Selection from a Star Spangled Spud.

As agricultural businesses capitalize on the opportunity to brand the previously unbranded, fitting fresh produce into the mold of consumer packaged goods, our fruit and vegetable aisle is transforming, and with it, our food itself. It’s hard not to wonder: What is the end game of this redesign? What would the produce aisle look like if every piece of citrus were palm-size, unblemished, and the same deep, glossy shade of carnelian? Or if we manipulated the spherical fruit into cubes for more space-efficient shipping? How will orchards be planned when farmers can use unmanned aerial robots to manage their crop? If profit is positively correlated with consistency (which it almost always is), are we designing our way to absolute uniformity?

Your American market has gone perhaps to far in filling consumers demand for convenience. Here, in croatian citrus market, which is pretty small (maybe 70.000 tones of mandarine production a year), there are no heavily designed varieties. Also i never heard for wraped fruit, except for wraping lemons in paper to conservate it. Do they wrap piece by piece, one by one? Here the fruits usually come in wooden boxes or in small one kg mesh bags.

You can get it any way you want it here. Boxed, mesh bag, wrapped in paper or loose & pick your own.

Oranges can be found wrapped in paper here also (as well as in other packaging forms or in bulk). They are wrapped as a way of "branding". This is usually done with special varieties, like blood oranges.

I listen to NPR at the house and was surprised to hear this story run last Monday on Marketplace.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/food-and-drink/how-cuties-marketed-mandarin-oranges-fruit-brand

How Cuties marketed Mandarin oranges from fruit to brand


Listen to the story here

Interview by Kai Ryssdal
Marketplace for Monday, April 2, 2012

Kai Ryssdal: I say citrus, you probably think oranges and lemons, limes maybe, and grapefruit, right?

More and more, though, the citrus that we're reaching for in the produce section are small, seedless, easy-to-peel and come in a five-pound bag. They're technically Mandarin oranges -- more commonly known, though, as Cuties.

Sarah Rich writes the Design Decoded blog for Smithsonian.com, where she recently explored the mandarins' journey from fruit to brand name. Sarah Rich, welcome to the program.

Sarah Rich: Thanks for having me.

Ryssdal: So, design of oranges, really?

Rich: Really, yeah. I was kind of intrigued by an advertising campaign towards the end of 2011 by a brand called Cuties that makes mandarins. And their tagline was 'Kids love Cuties because Cuties are made for kids.' And I kind of thought, 'Made for kids,' I wonder what's behind that?

Ryssdal: This marketing campaign you looked at, it's all about the physical and structural properties of this fruit. Tell us more about that.

Rich: There were four or five different little short spots that were put out for this. One of them is 'Know why Cuties are small? Because kids have small hands.' And one is, 'Know why Cuties are seedless? Because kids hate seeds.' And so it's all setting it up to be: structurally, this thing is great for a child.

Ryssdal: Which is great, because you want kids to eat fruit and be healthy and lord knows we need more of that in this country, but it's just a little depressing and cynical that that's the way the marketing goes.

Rich: Well you know, it's an effective marketing campaign. I mean, to me what was also interesting was just the fact at all that fruit is being sort of branded and marketed. But now I think in a similar way to the fact that people call tissues 'Kleenex,' people might start calling mandarins 'Cuties,' because that's the brand that's most predominant. The other way that they're being treated like a consumer packaged good is that you find things like coupons you can clip in the paper for Cuties brand specifically. You don't find clippable coupons for just any orange, so it becomes kind of a different cycle of the way that people are paying for it.

Ryssdal: Right. And it's also a little bit, so the Cuties are packaged and presented in such a way that there is a surface on which to put the branding, as opposed to those teeny little barcode stickers that you can't read anyway.

Rich: In order to brand really effectively with a fruit or vegetable, you do have to add packaging. There was a ridiculous example a year or two ago where Del Monte decided to put their bananas into a cellophane, individual cellophane wrapper. Everyone calls bananas the perfect fruit because they have this natural packaging, but how are you going to get enough of your brand onto it without this additional surface on which to put your logo and a tagline?

Ryssdal: What's the difference between a tangerine and a Cutie, one of these -- oh clementines, didn't they used to be called clementines?

Rich: Clementines. Yeah, the Citris reticulata Blanco is the [scientific] name for these things, and the numbers are pretty vast and the differences are somewhat subtle, but the characteristics that they're going for, including the color of the rind, the better it will sell; the ones that are smooth versus bumpy are going to be better. So you could find many different names of these things, but the differences generally are going to be kind of physical versus in terms of taste.

Ryssdal: Yeah, I always thought bumpy peels peeled easier than smooth peels, or is that just me?

Rich: You know, I think it has more to do with, they call it a zipper fruit -- it's meant to explain the sort of looseness of the skin around the fruit. And that's what makes it easy to peel, is there's sort of a separation between the fruit itself and the peel, so it kind of pops out like that.

Ryssdal: Did you ever think you were ever going to know this much about citrus?

Rich: No, it was quite a rabbit hole, from the TV commercial to all the things I learned.

Ryssdal: Yeah. Sarah Rich writes the Design Decoded blog on Smithsonian.com. Sarah, thanks a lot.

Rich: Thanks so much.

Unfortunatelly here in europe citrus ARE seedless for long and every year it gets harder to catch a seed ...

I ate last winter 12 Kilo Washington and got no single seed ..

Just got, Minneolas, Moro, PrimoFiori, Cumquat, Limequat, Citronquat which are growing now ...

Navels have very few if any seeds.

Yes !

The sense of the Navel is that the seeds should be there and not in the main fruit.

Nevertheless I found them before.

They are very big seeds who grow exellent.