You’ve come a long way, Baby Carrot

My daughters love pomegranates, but getting to the good part of the fruit is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The fruit is very difficult to cut open, and pulling the arils (seeds) off the peel is tedious and time consuming – not to mention dangerous when your teenager is wielding a big knife.

We recently discovered a great new value-added pomegranate product with the arils in a resealable package that can last many days in your refrigerator. The pomegranate has now moved up from a treat we used to enjoy a few times of year to daily consumption at our house. It’s exciting to see a product like this from the industry that is convenient and ends up raising the consumption of fruit and vegetables in our family.

Packaging advances continue to combinee convenience, food safety, sustainability and effective marketing with innovative fresh-cut products to increase the offerings in grocery stores.

Ten years ago fresh-cut products only had a small slice of shelf space in the produce department. Today, with all of the innovative packaging and eye-popping graphics, fresh-cut products have a dominant presence.

Since this is our packaging issue we wanted to bring as many innovative packaging ideas that we could. On page XX we feature the five winners of this year’s Produce Marketing Association Impact packaging awards.

It’s been 25 years since baby carrots and bagged salads appeared in grocery stores. I took a look back at some of our back issues of Fresh Cut from the early 1990s, and fresh-cut packaging wasn’t very appealing. All I can say is congratulations to the industry for all the hard work and dedication to improving your product and packaging, because you’ve come a long way baby carrot!

 



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