FRESHCONOMICS — The Podcast of the Fresh Produce Business

David Del Pino

I'm David Del Pino, and this is Freshconomics— Welcome to the Fresh Produce Business— A world where uncertainty is the only constant and volatility shapes every decision. Every day, remarkable people navigate this chaos with skill and courage. Join me as we explore the hidden logic of this industry to decode what others call unpredictable. Help me connect with the community of professionals in the fresh produce industry. Visit my blog at DavidDelPino.com where you'll find out how to get your copy of the book Freshconomics. And feel free to send any questions to: web@daviddelpino.com.

  1. 2d ago

    Ep. 20. The Entropic Sector. Why Does Your Fresh Produce Business Drift Towards Chaos?

    Allow me an analogy that I believe captures the essence of many of our problems. Imagine that your fresh produce business is one of those sandcastles you build (with your children) right at the water’s edge on a beach day. You built it with effort: perfect towers, well-defined walls, an elegant moat. But you're on the beach, and the waves keep coming. Every wave that breaks erodes the walls a little, blurs the outlines, drags sand away from the moat. There's no malice in the waves; they simply do what they do. And if you sit back and admire your castle without doing anything, within a few hours nothing will be left but a shapeless mound. To keep the castle standing you need to be constantly rebuilding, reinforcing, adding sand where it's been lost. You spend energy nonstop just to maintain what you already had. Not to improve it, mind you: simply to keep it from getting worse. This is the reality of the fruit and vegetable sector. The waves battering us are many: shifting climate, mutating pests, fluctuating markets, worker turnover, information that goes stale, processes that degrade. And our castle, our business, requires constant rebuilding effort just to remain standing. That's entropy feasting on our business. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, as this principle is formally known, tells us that the entropy of the universe always increases. That creating order requires investing energy. That maintaining order requires continuing to invest energy. Disorder, by contrast, is free. The universe, ironically, gives it away. But here's the crucial nuance: not all sandcastles are built equally close to the water. Not all businesses are equally entropic. And the fruit and vegetable sector, due to an accumulation of specific characteristics, is built practically right on the shoreline. In this episode know "the type of waves" that hit our business and how to mitigate their impact.

    Ep. 20. The Entropic Sector. Why Does Your Fresh Produce Business Drift Towards Chaos?

  2. Jul 16

    Ep. 19. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Why Is It So Hard to Innovate with Fruits and Vegetables?

    Welcome to a new episode of Freshconomics Podcast. Today we’re going to talk about how our prehistoric hominid brain explains one of the biggest challenges facing the modern food industry: the immense difficulty of innovating in the produce sector. And that “prehistoric something” is known as the omnivore’s dilemma. It’s a concept that anyone involved in food innovation should be familiar with. It was a man named Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who coined the term for this evolutionary dilemma. Given that it’s one of our species’ oldest conflicts, I’m surprised it isn’t better known. As omnivores, humans have a huge competitive advantage: we can eat almost anything. Plants, animals, fungi… our diet is incredibly varied. This allowed us to colonize virtually every corner of the planet, from the Arctic to the tropics. But that flexibility comes at a very high price: constant uncertainty. And our brain, shaped by millions of years of evolution, developed a default answer: food neophobia. In this episode, discover how this concept connects to the challenges of innovation in our industry.

    Ep. 19. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Why Is It So Hard to Innovate with Fruits and Vegetables?

  3. Jul 9

    Ep. 18. Loss Leaders. When Your Product Becomes the Bait

    One of any retailer’s central obsessions is getting people through the door.This is what the trade calls “footfall”, the frequency with which customers visit the store. The underlying theory is disarmingly simple: if we can just get you inside, you will end up buying something. And probably quite a lot of something. Many strategies exist to achieve this, and one of the most powerful is the Loss Leader Pricing Strategy. The implementation is straightforward to describe and somewhat brutal in practice. You take a “Leader” product and you sell it at a very low price -below market price- sacrificing your margin, and quite often selling at an outright loss. Hence the name: a product that leads the consumer in, sold at a loss. For the trick to work, the product has to meet two conditions at once. It must be relevant enough that people genuinely want it, and it must be offered at a price so unbeatable that it creates an irresistible pull - an exaggerated perception of value in the mind of the consumer. “Fifteen pence for two kilos of potatoes? I am running to the store now. The retailer is perfectly willing to lose money on that single line, in the firm belief that the loss will be more than recovered through everything else you drop into the trolley once you are inside. Welcome to a new episode of Freshconomics Podcast, dedicated to the consequences of the Loss Leader Pricing Strategy!

    Ep. 18. Loss Leaders. When Your Product Becomes the Bait

  4. Jul 2

    Ep. 17. Statistics, Surveys and other Lies

    Quite some time ago I remember reading a viral tweet from an American dentist that made me laugh out loud. If I recall properly, the dentist was sarcastically replying to the typical press story of: “9 out of 10 dentists recommend…”. The dentist said something along the lines of: “I’ve been in this profession for 20 years and nobody has ever asked me anything… and the thing is, I talk to my colleagues at the conferences, and I’ve never once met a single dentist who was asked anything either.” I think my automatic, almost involuntary laugh came from realizing that every industry is dealing with the same issues. It also made me realize that I tend to read news about surveys, trends, and market research in our own sector with a mixture of amused disbelief and skepticism. And I couldn’t help but start wondering since when, and how, all this happened to me. How did I go from being a marketing believer in market research and the power of data to a sarcastic sceptic? This is a story that spans the replication crisis in Academia, the erosion of trust in the Press and Media, and, ultimately, the challenges of building reliable knowledge from data in our sector.

    Ep. 17. Statistics, Surveys and other Lies

  5. Jun 25

    Ep. 16. Our Weakness is Our Strength

    Today I want to talk to you about something that sounds like a contradiction: the idea that our greatest weakness, as a sector, is also our greatest strength. To get there, I’m going to use a few concepts borrowed from operations management, economics and even a little bit of physics: efficacy versus efficiency, supply-driven versus demand-driven industries, Just-in-Time, Lean Management, Kanban, the efficiency paradox, oversized production assets and local supply chains. And I’m going to ask you a question that I think every professional in this business should be able to proudly answer. How is it possible that during the pandemic the powerful, modern, sophisticated industries — carmakers and so many others — had to stop their production lines, while the fresh produce sector not only kept working but dealt with a spectacular surge in demand? What is so special about this sector that it can do what is impossible for others? The reason is this: “our own weakness becomes our most resounding strength” when we face volatility. Let me explain why, because it is not pure luck. It is an industry structure built up by means of incentives. And once you understand it, you’ll never again let anyone look down on this business with a condescending smile.

    Ep. 16. Our Weakness is Our Strength

  6. Jun 18

    Ep. 15. Strategically Aligned Supply Chains

    For this episode, let me give you a preview of the topics I’m going to talk about: commoditisation, economies of scale, standardisation, critical mass, logistics, efficiency, intensive distribution, technology, breeding, deseasonalisation, convenience, innovation, and much more. All of those terms are ingredients of something we call strategically aligned global chains, and to explain it I’m going to use the history of the banana in the world. What does it take to turn a strange, exotic fruit into something the entire world’s population eats every day? How do you go about enormously expanding the supply of a product while at the same time dominating its markets and developing its demand? Because this is the story of how a food that was almost unknown in the northern hemisphere at the end of the nineteenth century became an irreplaceable part of our modern diet. A product that has built empires, provoked wars, toppled governments, and to which we owe expressions such as “banana republic”. And we have to admit that the banana industry has done a spectacular job of turning it into an affordable, everyday product. However, being cheap (affordable) may be a necessary condition for such success, but it is not a sufficient one.

    Ep. 15. Strategically Aligned Supply Chains

  7. Jun 11

    Ep. 14. The Minority Rule

    Who really rules a market? Who really rules an industry or a society. We usually answer without thinking too hard: the majority rules! The big consumer rules. The big buyer rules. The retail chain that moves millions rules. And yet, every time I look closely at how decisions are actually made along the fresh produce value chain, I run into the same uncomfortable surprise: very often the one who decides is not the one who weighs the most, but the one who concedes or agrees the least. The less flexible ones and with the stronger convictions are winning. I learned to put a name to that intuition by reading a book of Nassim Taleb. In Skin in the Game, he describes what he calls the Minority Rule. I used it in my book Freshconomics, but, I think, I could’ve probably elaborated a bit more around this topic. I could’ve gone deeper in the implications. What follows is the story of how this exotic idea explains why almost every soft drink in the United States is kosher, or why almost all of New Zealand’s lamb is halal… … and explains with almost unsettling precision the famous “certification hell” we suffer in farming. And, above all, why that should change the way we look at sustainability, organics, and the new tsunami of requirements knocking at our door.

    Ep. 14. The Minority Rule

  8. Jun 4

    Ep. 13. Tycoons Crashing into Fresh Produce

    In German there is a word, Schadenfreude, which roughly translates as “joy at someone else’s harm”. It refers to the pleasure one feels at watching another person suffer or fail. Friends, don’t do it. It’s not nice. Especially in our business. I know that some of our competitors can become actually insufferable, and when they get hit with bad harvests or wiped out by pests, we can’t help feeling certain relief. But it’s still wrong. We know all too well that we could be next when fortune’s wheel rolls round again. And yet… I cannot suppress an enormous guilty pleasure when I watch the technology tycoons crashing — over and over again — every time they put a tiny foot into the world of food, or directly into our agricultural and fresh produce business. I no longer know if it’s the influence of Hollywood films, which have turned the “billionaire tech-bro” into the favorite villain of our times. Well… I know is a stereotype, but I don’t think I can blame the movies for this one. I think this guilty pleasure has more to do with the arrogance I perceive in the projects these billionaires launch. And it goes without saying that this business (the fresh produce business) smashes the arrogant. You can have all the money in the world and all the confidence you like, but in our sector, just a couple of consecutive mistakes bring well-experienced professionals to their knees. So, in the fresh produce industry we live in a different kind of film, with no clear superheroes and no clear villains. We live more like in a low-budget B-movie — but our characters (I have to say) are far more authentic than theirs. Anyway, let me tell you about the adventures of some of these tycoons in our business.

    Ep. 13. Tycoons Crashing into Fresh Produce
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About

I'm David Del Pino, and this is Freshconomics— Welcome to the Fresh Produce Business— A world where uncertainty is the only constant and volatility shapes every decision. Every day, remarkable people navigate this chaos with skill and courage. Join me as we explore the hidden logic of this industry to decode what others call unpredictable. Help me connect with the community of professionals in the fresh produce industry. Visit my blog at DavidDelPino.com where you'll find out how to get your copy of the book Freshconomics. And feel free to send any questions to: web@daviddelpino.com.

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