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.
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