Dear colleague,
Let me begin with a confession. For many years, I felt lost in this business. Not lost in the sense of not knowing how to do my job — I managed, I sold, I bought, I negotiated, I survived. But lost in the deeper sense of not understanding why things worked the way they did. Why the economic models I had learned at university seemed to crumble the moment they touched the reality of a packhouse full of perishable fruits on a Monday morning. Why the senior professionals around me — people I had sometimes dismissed as unsophisticated — turned out to be right, again and again, while I struggled to articulate what they seemed to grasp intuitively.
This book, Freshconomics, was born from that anguish.
I write to you as someone who has spent more than 27 years in the fruit and vegetable business. I started in the Spanish citrus industry, moved to the United States for logistics and sales, came back to Spain, managed a large cooperative, lectured in business schools, and I am still learning. Along the way, I have accumulated degrees, positions, and scars — but more importantly, I have accumulated questions. Questions that refused to go away, that kept me awake at night, that I could not find answered in any textbook.
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In most industries, a year of practice is enough to become competent. Two years, and you are an expert. In our business, it is different. No two seasons are alike. No two days are alike. The volatility is so pervasive that even after a decade, you are still a student. We say it ourselves, in the phrases that have become part of our professional heritage: “You are only worth what your last shipment was worth“ or “This is like blackjack — sometimes you’re under, and sometimes you go bust.”
And yet, for all this accumulated wisdom, we have no formal body of knowledge to call our own. We have heuristics — rules of thumb, proverbs, gut feelings — that defy what the economics textbooks say we should do. We have seasoned professionals who can sense a market shift before it happens, but who cannot explain why. When young colleagues ask them, “But why won’t it work?” they can only shrug and say, “It just won’t.” And they are almost always right.
This gap between experience and knowledge haunted me. I wanted to close it. Not because I thought I was smarter than the veterans — far from it — but because I believed that if we could name what we were doing, if we could give shape to the invisible rules that governed our decisions, we could share them. We could accelerate the learning curve for newcomers. We could communicate with the bankers, the technologists, the seed companies, the regulators — all those external actors who look at us and do not understand why we do things differently.
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My aim with Freshconomics is not to generate a body of scientific knowledge. That would be presumptuous, and probably impossible. My aim is more modest and more practical: to compile a decision-making toolkit based on the professional experience of an entire sector. To gather together those “clichés” we use every day and give them context. To question the academic models that do not fit and propose alternatives that do.
The book is both a theoretical inquiry and a personal journey. It reflects my own path from cognitive dissonance to a tentative understanding. I have structured it around the discipline of Complex Problem Solving — a field that studies decision-making in volatile, uncertain environments where there are no neat answers. This seemed fitting for an industry where, as we like to say, “only the paranoid survive.”
I wrote and rewrote this book five times over many years. I let the ideas flow, then tried to order them into a narrative. I collected jokes, proverbs, and sayings from my teachers, colleagues, bosses, and clients. Some of them are no longer with us, and I regret that they will not be able to call me to reprimand me for including their words and stories. I have also read voraciously — economics, psychology, philosophy, stock market theory — and some of those authors have seeped so deeply into my thinking that I can no longer distinguish their words from mine. Let this acknowledgment stand as a tribute to them and find them in the compilation of bibliography and inspirational texts included in the book.
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I wrote Freshconomics primarily for professionals in the fruit and vegetable sector — or for those who want to pursue a career in it. But I also hope it will be useful to the many actors who interact with our industry: input suppliers, seed companies, technology providers, financial institutions, logistics companies, retailers, policymakers, and even consumers who want to understand why the price of their tomatoes fluctuates so wildly.
If you have ever felt the frustration of not understanding what is happening and why — if you have ever sensed that the tools you were given at university do not work in practice — then this book is for you. I want to spare you the years of anguish I went through. Or, at the very least, I want to give you a vocabulary and a framework to begin finding your own answers.
There is a phrase from Naval Ravikant that captures one of the main objectives of this book: “Judgment requires experience, but it can be achieved faster by learning fundamental skills.” I am not promising to give you all the skills you need to succeed in this business. But I hope to help you develop judgment faster — by showing you the fundamental patterns, the recurring traps, and the hidden logic that govern our volatile, unpredictable, and endlessly fascinating world.
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Writing this book has not been without risk. Years ago, I had to shut down my personal blog because the opinions I expressed affected my professional career. I may not have fully recovered from that experience. But I have decided to bear the consequences of my decision. I welcome criticism. I welcome disagreement. I love to be questioned and proven wrong — it is the best way to keep learning.
This book is, in a sense, an open letter to my industry. It is an invitation to continue the conversation. If you find errors or inconsistencies, I will be grateful for the correction. And if you find that some of what I have written resonates with your own experience — that you too have felt lost, and are still searching — then perhaps we can search together.
The world of fruit and vegetables is a distinctive field of activity, with its own culture, its own house — oikos — and its own rules — nomos. With the name Freshconomics, I hope to take us one step closer to what could one day become a recognized body of knowledge. Not yet a science, perhaps. But a shared language, at least. A way of understanding each other and being understood.
Thank you for considering reading it. And thank you, in advance, for joining me on this journey.
With respect and gratitude,
David Del Pino
