Still A Side Dish

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

Three cheers for nutritional literacy, but we better understand the obstacles. We live in a society where a study of university students found that 40 percent of the students could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century.

Perhaps you think anything that old is irrelevant? Well, the same study found that only 37 percent of the students were aware that the Battle of the Bulge took place during World War II. Please note that those who were surveyed in this study are high school graduates who were accepted at a college and are studying there.

High school students? Well, a national test of high school seniors found that over half of those tested could not name our enemy in World War II. Eighteen percent believed that the Germans were our allies in the war!

So if we can’t get the Nazis down as the enemy, it seems unlikely that nutritional literacy is an achievable goal.

It is a piece of cake, though, compared to getting high-volume produce buyers to make taste a priority. How would they do this? They could order better grade standards — say, a Washington Extra Fancy apple as opposed to a U.S. Fancy grade apple — but that won’t do it because taste isn’t part of any grade standard. It is easy to buy prettier produce because most grade standards are built around cosmetic issues, but it is almost impossible to buy more tasty produce in any kind of standardized way.

Independent high-end restaurants can probably buy more flavorful produce because the chef can walk the local farmer’s market or terminal market, taste the fruit and find that extraordinary lot of peaches. Because that small restaurant can change its menu on a whim, a chef can decide not to do an apple pie today but to do a peach melba because the peaches are so wonderful.

But this is meaningless for the members of the volume foodservice industry. First of all, they do not have the flexibility to change menu items very quickly, so even if they could identify particularly flavorful produce, they probably can’t use it. Beyond this, they have no choice but to simply order by grade standards.

I’ve been trying to nudge Wal-Mart for several years into seizing the leadership role on taste. With its volume and dedicated supply network, it is ideally suited to setting a definition of “Tasty” for many items and then including the definition in its specification. There are plenty of issues at retail: If Wal-Mart insists on a certain brix level and a particular fruit isn’t available, what does Wal-Mart do? Not sell it? Sell bad stuff?

Food serves many purposes in life, so we shouldn’t prejudge the consumer. Maybe a consumer who wants big strawberries wants them whether they are tasty or not because she is going to wrap each one in chocolate or soak it in Amaretto or whatnot.

What would work best would be if Wal-Mart did the research to identify those products with identifiable and quantifiable taste measurements, such as brix levels, and then create a logo to announce this product has been Wal-Mart-certified to meet certain taste thresholds. Wal-Mart could sell the same products without the certification, but its absence on products that can be certified would be a sign the flavor is not ideal on these items.

This would help Wal-Mart. Its vision of being “the buying agent for the consumer” isn’t being fulfilled if that means low price regardless of taste.

It would really help the whole industry because it would let everyone else piggyback on a science-based taste standard. This way, foodservice operators who wanted good taste would also have a standard to order it by.

PMA research has indicated 43 percent of consumers consider the presence of fruits and vegetables to be a key factor when choosing a restaurant. This may be damning the industry with faint praise. Remember a landslide politically is when someone gets about 60 percent of the vote. Johnson versus Goldwater, Nixon versus McGovern; these were routs — but the losers still got 40 percent of the vote.

The truth is that restaurant executives tell us over and over again that the consumer is very focused on protein. All those little comment cards come back and very, very, very few are even talking about the fruits and vegetables on the menu.

A few expensive restaurants, especially steakhouses, raise the importance of the fruits and vegetables by selling them on an a la carte basis. But at most restaurants, the “sell” is the protein and everything else is to fill up the plate and the belly — a dynamic that usually leads to copious portions of cheap starches such as french fries or mashed potatoes.

Even in the steakhouses where people pay for their produce, it is still the protein that gets center stage. Though sometimes a signature produce item keeps people coming back (the long-established Brooklyn steakhouse, Peter Lugar, for example, is famous for its tomato and onion salad — though more for its dressing than such fantastic tomatoes or onions), it is still the case that overwhelmingly people select a steakhouse, whether upscale or mid-scale, for the quality of the meat and the value delivered.

At Peter Lugar or Old Homestead in Manhattan, it may be the prime grade beef; at an Outback, it may be the spices used on a choice piece of meat. Still and all, it is not the norm for consumers to change restaurants because of the quality of the produce.

We may think we are big shots but too many consumers, we’re just a side dish.