FRESHCONOMICS — The Podcast of the Fresh Produce Business

Today we’re going to talk about sustainability. But not in the way you’re used to hearing about it. I’m not going to tell you that plastic is evil and must be wiped out. And I’m not going to tell you that plastic is wonderful and must be kept. I’m going to tell you something rather more uncomfortable: that simple solutions to complex problems tend to create new problems nobody saw coming.

From 2030, a new Regulation comes into force across the entire European Union, banning the use of plastic for retail packs of fresh fruit and vegetables under 1.5 kilos. It’s a well-meaning measure. The environmental damage done by plastic is obvious, documented, undeniable. Nobody in the fresh produce sector disputes that we need to cut plastic use.

What we don’t yet know is whether the final balance of this measure will turn out positive or negative for the environment. Because the second-order consequences — and the third-order ones — are already starting to surface. And they aren’t exactly encouraging.

This  a story about something I experienced years ago. A story that captures, better than any theory I could lay out, one of the central arguments of my book: why the fresh produce sector is so stubbornly heterogeneous in its management models, and why the standardised solutions that work brilliantly everywhere else crash and burn the moment you try to use them on fruit and vegetables.

It isn’t that we’ve never heard of the great management theories. It isn’t that the consultants from the big firms have never reached our sector. They’ve reached it. They keep reaching it. But they’ve been unable to see the fundamental differences between our world and other industries... and that’s exactly why they’ve failed.

The story is about Lean Management. But it could just as easily have been about the Balanced Scorecard, about Agile methodologies, or about any other management tool that revolutionised manufacturing and then, the moment it crossed the border into our world of fruit and vegetables, smashed headlong into a reality it simply didn’t understand.

Listen to this episode if you want to know why and how consultants fail in the Fresh Produce Sector.

This episode could just as easily have been called “How to Be a Fresh Produce Salesman and Live to Tell the Tale”. Or “Confessions of a Rookie Salesman”... Because it’s a personal story.

The story of how an agronomy engineer who throws himself into fresh produce sales discovers that nothing he learned at university about microeconomics — or in his marketing master’s — could be applied to the fruit and vegetable business in any way that actually worked.

That engineer turned salesman was me. And the instruction manual for surviving one more day in the business didn’t seem to be in any textbook. It lived in a concept my veteran colleagues knew intuitively, but that nobody had ever spelled out for me in words. And that concept is (drum roll): “the price corridor.”

This episode is dedicated to all those young — and not so young — people who are starting to find their way into our business and want to know what they’re in for. Because yes, I go on and on about how special and different we are in fresh produce. But that’s because it’s true.

Today we’re going to talk about something no fresh produce professional ever wants to live through but that you’d better be ready for if it lands on your doorstep: the reputational crisis.

Let me tell you the tale of Blue Fruit company and Red Fruit company — roughly, “So-and-So Fruits” and “Such-and-Such Fruits” — totally made-up names, just in case someone recognises themselves in the story and takes it the wrong way. So, as a disclaimer: Any resemblance to reality would be pure coincidence.

Two stories running in parallel. Two fresh produce companies. Two near-identical accusations. Two radically different endings. And running through it all, one lesson that flatly contradicts what most crisis-management manuals have been teaching us for decades.

Let me start with a thought from the German philosopher Hegel on the Zeitgeist — that concept regarding the “spirit of the age” that binds us to our social reality and sets limits on what we’re able to do.

No man can step outside his own time, said Hegel. And that’s especially relevant for our sector, because the current fresh produce Zeitgeist has a particularly uncomfortable feature: we’re guilty until proven innocent and even once we’ve proven our innocence with a pile of certifications and external audits, we’re still under suspicion.

I'd love to see Robert Jacques Turgot's face — the 18th-century French economist who first identified the law of diminishing returns — as he walks into a modern gene-editing lab. He'd finally find the answer to a question that haunted him nearly 250 years ago: what happens when you hit the ceiling of what land can produce?

In this episode, Turgot's centuries-old economic law is connected to one of the biggest regulatory shifts in recent European history: the December 2025 EU agreement opening the door to gene-edited crops. It's a story that runs from 1960s wheat fields to CRISPR-edited tomatoes, and it reframes how we should think about the future of agriculture.

The core idea is this: if the Green Revolution of the 1960s raised agricultural yields by intensifying inputs — more fertiliser, more irrigation, more machinery — the upcoming Green Software Revolution works differently. It doesn't add more to the field; it rewrites the plant itself, the way a programmer edits lines of code. A drought-resistant tomato, a browning-resistant apple, a virus-immune banana. These aren't incremental gains, they're a change in the source code of food.

But if food becomes programmable, who owns the code? Can we draw a parallel to the Android-versus-iOS battle in tech? ... and maybe ask what it means for growers if the real power shift upstream, toward whoever holds the patents.

Tune in to listen to this futuristic narrative about Turgot's law limitations, New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) and the economics of platform control. This episode may change how you look at the produce aisle.

I don’t know if this happens to you too, but ever since I started working in the fresh produce sector (many years ago), I’ve had the feeling that I live in a parallel world.

Now, I haven’t lost my mind. Well… maybe I have. But let me explain, and you can judge for yourselves by the end of the episode.

I suppose it happens in any sector, in any business. Every business has its own codes, its own rhythms, its culture, its jargon and bit by bit that separates you from other groups and from the way they see life.

We live in the world of urgency —everything was needed yesterday—, the world of daily surprises —let’s see what happens now—; and, of course, you get contaminated by it. Then you go and deal with the public administration, with the kids’ school, with the car garage or the home-insurance people, and you can’t for the life of you understand how anything works.

How is it possible they still haven’t got back to me?

How is it possible that institutions behave this way?

If we ran things like that, we’d have shut up shop long ago!

… And you turn into that insufferable know-it-all — who has a strong opinions on absolutely everything that, ultimately, leads you to a complete perplexity with those other realities.

And to make sense of it, I often tell myself: those are parallel universes, and I live in mine. The fruit and vegetable business seems to operate in its own universe, under its own physics, with its own fundamental constants.

To explain it, I’ll have to call on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and on how we have to accept that space and time are not absolute. And that, just as with relativity, our everyday experience doesn’t let us grasp how it works intuitively. How could it ever be intuitive that space-time curves?

Because space and time, in our case too, are intertwined in a particular way, creating this strange universe of ours.

In other words, the fresh produce business also has its own rules. Rules so fundamental, and so different from those of other economic sectors, that we could quite reasonably speak of an alternative universe. A universe defined by those three fundamental dimensions: Space, Time, and a set of fundamental constants (and I’d name Volatility as the chief of those constants).

And if we stretch the analogy a little, I’ll borrow the concept of the multiverse as explained by David Deutsch (a British theoretical physicist who has written several popular science books, and who also happens to be the father of quantum computing).

In that sense, each fresh produce product seems to have its own separate universe. And, as in the multiverse that Mr Deutsch describes so well, each universe resembles the one before it but with a few differences that make it unique.

So welcome to a new episode of Freshconomics Podcast and let’s see if I can make this mad ramble about physics and fruit entertaining.

You’re heading to your local grocery store one day, and you walk in at the same time as a lady who’s just parked a top-of-the-range BMW. Well-dressed and carrying one of those luxury designer handbags, she’s a few steps ahead of you down the aisles — and, in a moment of indiscretion, you can’t help glancing at her trolley… and It’s full of own-brand products, special offers and promotions.

Coming the other way, down the same aisle, is a young man who looks like a student. His trolley is half empty: a punnet of organic strawberries and a single fair-trade avocado.

What on earth is going on here? Have consumers lost their minds?

No. What you’re witnessing is the everyday expression of one of the most profound shifts in consumer behaviour of the last few decades: the bipolarity of markets.

It’s a phenomenon that is radically rewriting the rules of the game in the world of mass consumption and today we’re going to explore it from the trenches of the fresh produce world.

Discover in this episode the concept of Masstige, the evolving pyramid of consumption, the consumer mental accounting, Veblen's conspicuous consumption, the two-factor theory of Frederick Herzberg and a lot more.

The phone rings very early. Too early. And it’s not just any phone: it’s the mobile phone of a well-known Central European trader…and the veteran salesman already knows what’s coming.

A number that doesn’t usually show up on the screen. A customer who’s gone months without so much as a sign of life. But, of course, on the other end of the line, a friendly voice greets you with excessive familiarity.

In the fresh produce business, calls like these are like the canaries the miners used to carry down into the underground galleries: an early signal that something in the market’s air is changing. And the experienced salesman knows how to read it.

In this episode we’re going to dig into one of those conversations every sales representative in the sector has lived through at some point. A conversation that hides deep lessons about the strategic classification of customers, about the signals that a market trend is turning, and about that merciless law we call “the inelasticity of supply in the short term”.

Because when an occasional buyer calls in a hurry asking for goods, the real message isn’t in his words, it’s in the very fact that he’s called at all.

It gets harder and harder for me to explain, in plain words, why the fresh produce business is so complex. The book I wrote is a proper doorstopper. It’s conceptually dense, and it forces the reader through their own process of discovery.

And ever since I wrote the book, my own way of reasoning has become more and more anchored in those specific concepts — but to talk to someone who hasn’t internalised them, you have to set them aside. So, for the podcast, I keep racking my brain over how to get “my truths” across in plainer, friendlier language.

And that’s how I came back to the poker-and-chess analogy applied to the world of business. Both games have been used endlessly to draw parallels with strategy and with business or financial decision-making.

A while ago I relistened to an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where he interviewed the former poker player Annie Duke that I thought I could be useful. And after re-listening to that Tim Ferriss episode, I got a pretty good sense of this former professional poker player’s book.

In 2018 she published the bestseller Thinking in Bets, about her life as a professional player and how to apply its lessons to decisions in life generally... and in business too.

I also remembered a book by the hugely famous world chess champion Garry Kasparov on what chess can teach us about business strategy. As a teenager I went through a phase of youthful fascination with chess, and it seems my mind still chooses to pay attention to the subject.

I have to admit I haven’t actually read either book. But the topic came to my attention after I read a post on twitter, and I thought: hi, what a great analogy!

Maybe this way I can talk about determinism, stochastic processes, Bayesian statistics or emergent processes in complex systems without boring you to death.

And although - as I said, and as you can check for yourselves with a quick internet search - this analogy has been used a great deal, I’m going to try to adapt it to our business.

So let’s see how it turns out…

 I came across Niklas Modig (a professor and researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics) by the TED talk he gave in 2016 in the town of Umeå, in Sweden, which deals broadly with a concept he calls “the Efficiency Paradox”.

After watching the whole video (that lasts almost 20 minutes) I was swept up in a feeling of rediscovery. He managed to explain something complex, something every one of us in management deals with, in a wonderfully simple way.

The concept is the efficiency paradox, and the visual analogy is that of islands of efficiency.

Ever since that rediscovery, it’s a concept I’ve gone on using in my talks, in my articles, and of course in my book. I’ve even borrowed the graphic image this author proposes to illustrate the phenomenon: the image of a group of small islands, all sitting close to one another.

Mr Modig (and the co-author of his book, Mr Åhlström) use the analogy of a group of islands as a powerful visual image of a system that is only nominally connected.

Very often, those of us connected by a business value chain are like a group of islands. We can almost see one another from island to island, yet we operate disconnected from any common logic.

Each island, perfectly formed, with its own ecosystem running like clockwork. But between them, the ocean. A few kilometres of water that make communication, trade and movement difficult. Each island optimises according to its own internal resources; but are they optimised to function together? Not necessarily.

In today’s episode I’m going to try to explain what this efficiency paradox teaches us, and what these islands of efficiency look like when we apply them to our fresh produce world.