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How were peeled baby carrots invented? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Joseph Ahrens, PhD plant physiology, invented peeled baby cut carrots in 1989, on Quora:
Mike Yurosek was a great guy. He wasn’t the largest carrot grower in Southern California. He only controlled about 10,000 acres. But he was always thinking. And he was flexible to consider new ideas. Carrots at the time were either sold with green tops (bunch carrots), in plastic bags (called cello carrots), or in jumbos in bulk. These were massive carrots. Destined to be chopped and put in to canneries or sold as animal feed. Thin, under-sized carrots were chopped, run through a potato peeler and then frozen, to be sold to soup companies. There weren't a lot of them, so there weren't dedicated equipment lines for them. Most carrot growers also grew potatoes, so the peelers were available.
One year the carrot crop produced a lot of scraggly, long, thin carrots. The freezers of Campbell’s and everyone else were full. There was no place to put them. Mike got the idea to take those same freezer-ready carrots and sell them on the fresh market, as snacks. Great idea. But they lasted in the bag only a couple of days. Most were rotten before they even got to the grocery store warehouses.
I was on the faculty of the University of California, Davis. My specialty at the time was “transportation and distribution of perishables”. One day I got a call from Mike. “Help!” So I drove down there and looked at what was going on. They were cutting these long, skinny carrots with manual choppers on basically a loading dock out in the open, then with snow shovels, loading them into a potato peeler, them packing them in low density polyethylene bags. They then put them in the refrigerated warehouse, but they were indeed dead in four days. You've got to have ten days shelf life and better, fourteen for fresh produce to survive through the marketing channel.
I brought in a custom equipment manufacturer who designed automated cutters and we got that step taken care of. Evenly cut reproducible carrot blanks. We put in another wash station after the cutters and Mike had conveyors built. I worked with the equipment guy and we ended up with two modified peelers with rollers (something like sandpaper on rollers) specifically designed for carrots. A third “peeler” was modified to be more like a polisher so there was a silky smooth finish. Then another sanitizing bath before being packaged.
This all took about half a year to work this out. We got the shelf life to eight days, so we got them in some stores, but just distribution into the Los Angeles and Las Vegas areas. I convinced Mike to move the operation from off that loading dock to inside of a refrigerated area. It was a funny day. He exclaimed “how can cold air cool these carrots?” They thought that the process now had gotten so fast that no cooling was needed at that point, and cooling was only needed for storage. I won the argument and while they were moving I took some of the finished carrots back to my laboratory.
With the help of my assistant Xavier Flores and my second graduate student Mark Ritenour, we measured the respiration of the carrots and determined the optimum atmosphere for the longest shelf life. They were actually “wounded” and therefore were respiring (breathing) fast. In a normal sealed bag they would use up all the oxygen and produce high amounts of carbon dioxide.
I called in a bag manufacturer, Stan Roth, and he designed a plastic bag that allowed just the right amount of oxygen in and also did not let the carbon dioxide build up. A “breathable” bag. It also tricked the cut and polished carrots into thinking that they weren't peeled and therefore wouldn't “scab” over. This gave the required shelf life. To this day, if you see white on those carrots (called “blush”), it is a sign of dehydration and wound healing: meaning something went wrong with the bag. They're still perfectly fine to eat.
We eventually also introduced a way to micro-prick regular bags so they would also allow proper air exchange. Today, for a relatively short shelf life (two weeks), a micro-prick system is used. For longer, breathable plastic (controlled atmosphere) bags are used. We returned to Bakersfield and gave it a test. Two weeks. Magic. This led to national distribution. Over the next couple of years I trained Mike’s people how to sanitarily handle these carrot plugs as gently as possible and the shelf life improved even more.
Then as the market got big enough, we starting talking about not just packing rejects, but growing varieties with attributes specifically for this “baby cut” carrot. Quality and taste improved and we finally reached a shelf life of one month. I remember when in the mid nineties the sales of baby cuts exceeded cello carrots and they never looked back. The demand got so high that they were telling wholesale buyers that if they wanted to have the baby cuts, they also had to buy some cello carrots. A long way from at first trying to sell rejects and just get rid of skinny carrots!
The last step was to design large storage facilities where during the season, massive amounts of carrots are cut into the slugs and stored, much like potatoes, with the peel still on. Then during the non-growing season these slugs are brought out of storage, peeled, polished, and bagged. Of course, all the neighboring farms caught on and eventually Yurosek's “Bunny Luv” brand was bought by an even larger carrot company, Bolthouse I believe. It's a great system. A great product. No preservatives. And I am glad I had the opportunity to have a hand in it.
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