FRESHCONOMICS — The Podcast of the Fresh Produce Business

There is a word we keep repeating in the fresh produce business, almost without realising it. A word we inherited from textbooks, from conferences, from our business professors who told us that our fruits and vegetables were just another example of the agricultural economic model. The word, of course, is “commodity”.And if I had to pick one idea from my book Freshconomics that I would like to shake out of the collective head of the industry, this might be the one. Because calling our products commodities is not just only inaccurate, it is actually misleading.It shapes how we price, how we negotiate, how we plan, how we invest. And it often sends us in the wrong direction.So today I want to share with you an evolution of that concept. An evolution that is the backbone of a full chapter in the book, and that I have decided to give its own name because.Because, as the famous philosopher Wittgenstein reminded us, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”. If we don’t have a word for something, we literally cannot see it clearly.And that word I want to offer to you is “Freshmodities”. And by the end of this episode, I hope you will never again look at a pallet of apples, or a crate of lettuces, or a tray of strawberries, in quite the same way.

Gregory King was a pioneer of economic science. He was the first to document how volatility in production affects prices more than proportionally. How a small change in the available quantity of a crop can send prices through the roof.I suppose that what we now call King’s Law is intuitive for some people, but it wasn’t for me. Perhaps because the modern world -especially in developed countries- has shielded us from some fundamental truths.In many other parts of the world and in other times, people were painfully aware of the suffering caused by scarcity. Mr King simply put numbers to it and explained the mechanism back in the 17th century. But the truth was always there for anyone willing to see it.What follows is the story of how, despite having studied all of this at university, I only truly understood it when I was already out there, working. It seems there are things you can only learn through the school of hard knocks and street fights.Welcome to a new episode of Freshconomics Podcast

What truly drives the fresh produce business?If you come from a marketing background (like I do), your gut will say “demand”. If you were trained in any business school (as I was), you will talk about understanding the consumer. And if you’ve worked at a consulting firm advising food companies (like I have), you will probably recommend building your entire strategy around what people want to buy.And you know what? In most industries, you would be absolutely right. But in ours… if that’s your mental model about the fresh produce industry, you are heading for troubles.Today I want to talk to you about one of the singularities of the industry that I feel more strongly about, one that I discuss in the book perhaps too politely, too academically, and that, by contrast, in private conversations with colleagues and clients I end up repeating myself with, probably, far more emphasis than needed.The concept is simple to state but profound in its implications: the fresh fruit and vegetable business is a Supply Sector. And if you do not understand what that means, you will keep running into walls you cannot see.

Not everything was going to come straight from the book. This is the first episode we go off-topic. In any case, this episode picks up a story that, I think, is little known: "the birth of the Sicilian Mafia due to the cultivation of lemons".Yes, I know it sounds unbelievable but fruits and vegetables are behind a many extraordinary stories like this one or, to name another, the case of the banana that gave rise to the so-called “banana republics”.Learn about the history of Italy and the fresh produce business through the power of stories, legends, books, podcasts and academic papers.

Quality control in the fresh produce business is one of the most misleadingly complex activities you can imagine. On paper, it seems straightforward: learn the regulations, understand the specifications, measure the tolerances. In practice, it becomes a philosophical journey into the nature of perception, value, and what we truly mean when we say something is "good enough".Today, I want to share with you one of the most powerful heuristics I learned early in my career—a simple rule that has saved me many times from losing perspective in the chaos of daily quality assessments. It’s called The Kinship Test, and it might just change the way you think about quality forever.

As you already know from the previous episodes, over the past years I have been collecting, writing, rewriting and drafting texts to complete a book dedicated to the fruit and vegetable sector. A book that is both a text about the fresh produce business and a strange kind of autobiography of my endeavours in the industry.This is because much of the content is the fruit of conversations and personal experiences with colleagues, clients, and bosses throughout my almost 30 years of professional practice.One of main ideas of the book is that there is a common heritage in the sector. That there is a shared culture that is often conveyed in the form of aphorisms, stock phrases, jokes, or even stories. And that these phrases contain deep truths about how the fruit and vegetable industry works and how decisions are made.

For this episode, I want to focus on one fundamental concept: the FRESHMARKET. And notice I didn't say we're going to talk about the "fresh produce market" in general, because I'm trying to establish a very specific term, The FRESHMARKET, to describe something quite different from what you might expect.That somewhere between the farm and your shopping cart exists an invisible market (a mental model shared by thousands of professionals) where prices are truly formed, and fortunes are made or lost in a matter of hours. Today, we dive into one of the most important concepts in the fresh produce world: the Freshmarket. A market that exists, even though you cannot see it, touch it, or visit it; and yet it governs every transaction in this volatile industry.

And this is where a new adventure begins. An adventure that actually started many years ago when I launched a blog under my name (daviddelpino.com) and dedicated to the world of fresh produce. I did it when blogs were already an almost outdated form of communication. The reception from the fruit and vegetable industry was surprising. The following and respect over the many years of blogging encouraged me to finish writing the book I had been planning for so long.The book is called Freshconomics, and as some of you may already know, it was published last year in Spanish and recently in English; but I have decided that I am not going to stop there.So, I am starting a series of podcasts (both in Spanish and English) with the same name as the book. And, of course, I know that I am probably also late to the world of podcasts, but anyway here we go. The podcast takes the same name of the book because the goal is to broaden the audience for the contents of the book. But I also hope it can be a great open window into the sector and maybe in the future other voices can join. But for now, welcome to Freshconomics Podcast!