The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [83]
One day in 1986 the Goodmans learned that the Carmel chef who bought the bulk of their lettuce crop had moved on, and that his replacement wanted to use his own supplier. Suddenly they were faced with a field of baby greens to get rid of, greens that wouldn’t stay baby for very long. So they decided to wash and bag them, and try to sell a prewashed salad mix at retail. Produce managers greeted the novel product with skepticism, so the Goodmans offered to take back any unsold bags at the end of the week. None of them was returned. The “spring mix” business had been born.
So at least goes the Earthbound creation story, as recounted to me by Myra Goodman, now a tanned, leggy, and loquacious forty-two-year-old, over lunch at the company’s roadside stand in the Carmel Valley. Like Cascadian Farm, Earthbound still maintains a showplace farm and roadside stand, a tangible reminder of its roots. Unlike Cascadian, however, Earthbound is still very much in the farming business, though most of its production land is an hour northeast of Carmel, in the Salinas Valley. Opening onto the Pacific near Monterey, the fertile, sea breeze–conditioned valley offers ideal conditions for growing lettuces nine months of the year. In winter, the company picks up and moves its operation, and many of its employees, south to Yuma, Arizona.
The prewashed salad business became one of the great success stories in American agriculture during the eighties and nineties, a time when there wasn’t much to celebrate, and the Goodmans are directly responsible for much of that success. They helped dethrone iceberg, which used to dominate the valley, by introducing dozens of different salad mixes and innovating the way lettuces were grown, harvested, cleaned, and packed. Myra’s father is an engineer and inveterate tinkerer, and while the business was still headquartered in their Carmel Valley living room, he designed gentle-cycle washing machines for lettuce; later the company introduced one of the first customized baby lettuce harvesters, and helped pioneer the packing of greens in specially formulated plastic bags pumped with inert gases to extend shelf life.
Earthbound Farm’s growth exploded after Costco placed an order in 1993. “Costco wanted our prewashed spring mix, but they didn’t want organic,” Myra told me. “To them, organic sent the wrong message: high price and low quality.” At the time, organic was still recovering from the boom and bust following the Alar episode. But the Goodmans were committed to organic farming practices, so they decided to sell Costco their organically grown lettuce without calling it that.
“Costco was moving two thousand cases a week to start,” Myra said, “and the order kept increasing.” Wal-Mart, Lucky’s, and Albertson’s soon followed. The Goodmans quickly learned that in order to feed the maw of this industrial beast, Earthbound would have to industrialize itself. Their days of washing lettuce in the living room and selling at the Monterey farmer’s market were over. “We didn’t know how to farm on that scale,” Drew told me, “and we needed a lot more land—fast.” So the Goodmans entered into partnership with two of the most established conventional growers in the Salinas Valley, first Mission Ranches in 1995, and then Tanimura & Antle in 1999. These growers (no one in the valley