"What's the bad news?"

“Listen, boss,” it began, “I’ve got good and bad news. The good news is that people love our new product’s taste. The bad news is that they don’t want to cook with it.”

This was the culmination of five years of work.

Mike Yurusek was on a mission. His agriculture business was fine, but he was wasting a lot of produce, forty percent some days. American consumers didn’t want misshapen, miscolored, or mishandled fruits or vegetables. These were plants, growing in nature, and they had to look, taste, and feel right.

Not only that, but his wife didn’t like them either. “Cooking takes too long,” she exclaimed, “I spent seven hours getting dinner ready. Can’t you figure out a better way?”

At work, Mike convened a meeting. “Listen up,” he told his crew of engineers, farmers, and processing partners. “We’re wasting too much of our crop and the parts we end up with are too time-consuming for the average consumer. Let’s find a better way.”

This was the start of five years of work.

“Listen, boss,” Mike heard, “I’ve got good news and even better news.”

People loved the taste of the product and though they didn’t like cooking with it they loved snacking on it. Snacks, Mike knew, were a billion-dollar industry. Mike’s market was no longer produced, but snacks.

In 1985, Americans bought about six pounds of carrots each year. In 1986 they bought ten. Mike Yurusek, the inventor of baby carrots, made that happen. Today nearly three-fourths of all carrots sold are baby carrots, a product built for one thing but which found success in another.

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