Baby Carrots. A Cautionary Tale

Consider the Baby Carrot, it may seem unassuming, harmless, cute even - but peer beneath its wholesome exterior and you’ll see that each miniature vegetable is in fact a towering monument to man’s hubris.

For all of us in the world of business, and especially those of us in the business of advertising, the baby carrot should serve as a bright orange reminder to focus on the problem you’re solving when deciding how to measure success.?

Like many cautionary tales, the story of the baby carrot begins with noble intentions. Four decades ago, near Bakersfield California, a carrot farmer named Mike Yurosek was facing a problem…

A sizable portion of Yurosek’s carrot harvest was deemed unsaleable, too many of his carrots were considered aesthetically deficient - ‘too ugly’ to be sold in the grocery store. Being the kind enterprising Carrot Man that in a very real sense ‘makes history’, Yurosek innovated a novel solution to his problem.

Yurosek shaved his Carrots.

In their natural state many of his carrots were visually peculiar; a hodgepodge of unsightly irregularities, but through choiceful disfigurement they became aesthetically uniform and desirable carrots.

These diminutive new ‘Baby Carrots’ were a triumph with consumers. Not only were they a commercial success - Yurosek increased the utilization of his farming assets and decreased the amount of carrots that ended up going to waste.

Overall U.S. carrot consumption exploded, it increased over 30% in a single year, and it would remain elevated above any kind of baseline growth rate for half a decade before it returned to the mean. This was a veritable ‘carrot craze’.

Even more mind blowing, not only did the innovative new baby carrot influence the overall scale of carrot consumption, it also demanded a 30% price premium. Consumers were now paying more for something that was previously considered unsaleable.

What Yurosek had achieved with the baby carrot is, quite frankly, an insane accomplishment. He had turned wastage into a premium product, increased category penetration, and increased consumption frequency. The marketing textbooks would have to be rewritten, this goes beyond an anomaly - in business terms it is nothing short of miraculous.

At first it seems like a triumph of the free market, of innovation, of sustainability in business. Hence why you'll often see the story of baby carrots, and their humble inventor Yurosek, presented as an aspirational allegory for belief winning out over adversity, Live Laugh Love for capitalism.

But is it that?

As much as I might try to adhere to the adage The Customer is Always Right - in the instance of the baby carrot I find myself wondering “are they though?” - now that supply has created its own enormous demand.

Baby Carrots have been such a commercial success they now account for 70% of all fresh carrots sold in the United States.?

Far from being a sustainable product that increases utilization, the production of Baby Carrots in The U.S. now generates 175,000 tons of waste byproduct a year.

Most baby carrots are rinsed with a chemical solution that contains chlorine, something used to keep pools free of bacteria but also historically deployed as a chemical weapon to kill soldiers in the trenches of World War I.

Unlike carrots in their natural state, which are protected from the elements by a tough exterior skin, baby carrots cannot be stacked on a shelf without being placed inside a cellophane plastic bag which is of course not biodegradable. Even when wrapped in their plastic little tents, baby carrots still require more energy intensive means of storage to prevent them going bad.

We can’t peer into the heart of Mike Yurosek and know his true intentions; whether his astounding commercial success was a happy byproduct of a greener ambition - but if the objective was sustainability then despite their phenomenal impact on our grocery habits they’ve surely failed.

In that sense, what we can glean from Yurosek’s story is the essential importance of keeping the real objective in mind when choosing how you measure success.

If the baby carrot story had featured an ad agency strategist, it’s conceivable that said hypothetical strategist might have shown Mike Yurosek a slide that looked something like this:

Objective: Make carrots more sustainable and reduce wastage

Insight: The consumer’s love of carrots is skin deep, they don’t buy ugly carrots

Strategy: Give ugly carrots a glow up

Idea: Baby Carrots

KPI: Sales of Baby Carrots

This is a strawman - I’ll grant you that - but it serves to make a point. Choosing the right KPIs might sometimes seem like a bit of an afterthought. It’s usually the last thing written on a slide and very often we don’t think about measurement until after we’ve finished thinking about everything else.

So let these tiny orange abominations be a reminder. If you’re not measuring the right things you can end up doing the wrong things very well indeed.