I wonder if there's a market in the U.S. for luxury fruits. I always hear about these incredible fruits available abroad that are only available in certain seasons, in certain climates, that decay quickly and travel poorly.
Presumably, you could grow god-tier mangoes year-round, right in the city, by simulating the right climate in fancy greenhouses - if you did it right, you wouldn't have an electric bill. If the mangoes really are as great as I've heard them described, I can imagine people would pay a huge premium for them. You could sell them to fancy restaurants, make ultra-luxury fruit baskets (I understand these are a big deal for Asians & Asian Americans), and eventually scale up to selling them to upscale grocery stores.
There are organizations like https://crfg.org/ that grow exotic fruits that grocers don’t bother to stock. They don’t sell them (not enough money in it), but I know they’ll at least provide you with some if you’re doing an educational thing.
There are also a few businesses following exactly the model you outline, but they focus on one varietal/cultivar of one fruit, since each requires its own CapEx for its own climate setup.
The host of the YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/c/WeirdExplorer gets fruits in from both of these all the time, (when he’s not going directly to other countries just to try exotic fruits.)
I think there really is a market for special fruits but the problems that prevent them from being ubiquitous lead to them being extremely local. In my area, we have a specific type of strawberry that sells out as quickly as they can be harvested. They are unlike any other strawberry available. Super juicy and sweet. Bright red throughout. Extremely perishable and delicate. They are only available for about 3 weeks in June and they tend to get moldy within a few days of harvesting, so you really only see them at farmers markets and a handful of grocery stores that specialize in local produce. If you want the best ones, you need to buy them within an hour of the opening of the farmers market. By 90 minutes, even the lower quality ones are gone. You get 2 more tries the following weekends and then they are gone until next year.
Since they cannot travel or be kept in inventory, they will never be available fresh more than about 50 miles from where they are grown.
I asked someone why local village wine in the south of France was better than 75% of the bottles I'd had.
They told me "The best grapes never make it out of the village. The next best grapes never make it out of the region. The next best grapes never make it out of the country."
Wine was probably a terrible example, being a less perishable good suited for transport, but the quip always stuck with me. No idea the origin.
We (city folk) assume that the best agricultural output is exported, but... why would it be?
The price differential for quality likely isn't very large, local consumption is relatively modest compared to output, and cap that off with the freshness timer.
The best wine I've ever had was in the French countryside. The best beef I've had was in a dirty road place in the middle of cow country. The best salmon I've had was in Seattle. The best sushi I've had was behind Tsukiji (when they still did wholesale fish there).
Eat local is as much about quality as it is other things.
> I wonder if there's a market in the U.S. for luxury fruits
As a hobbyist rare fruit grower and someone who spends a lot of time watching rare fruit YouTube, I would say that even though all the ingredients are there, it would be a huge uphill battle.
First, let me say the amount of hype right now around rare fruit is completely insane. It's literally hundreds of times harder to get the top fruit cultivars than it is to get a new nike drop, a PS5, etc. Often they only go on sale one day a year and are completely sold out in less than a minute.
The problem though is that to build a business you need repeat customers. There aren't many people willing to pay $20+ for some weird looking fruit they've never heard of, let alone do this on a weekly basis. Similarly, there aren't many people willing to pay $20+ for a single apple on a regular basis, when they can buy apples at the store for less than a dollar.
As it currently stands, most of the people who would be interested in this don't have the money to pay for it, and most of the people with the money to pay for it aren't interested. I think YouTube has the potential to change this, but it clearly hasn't happened yet.
It would be cool to open a story in NYC dedicated entirely to rare and luxury fruit, but it would be an insane amount of work to market it. And even if you were successful, VCs would just give hundreds of millions of dollars to some Adam Neumann type who would put you out of business by selling the same things at a massive loss.
Even if you were successful, VCs would just give hundreds of millions of dollars to some Adam Neumann type who would put you out of business by selling the same things at a massive loss.
I don't think it's VCs per se. For example, Amazon is actively trying to get in to fresh food logistics of late with their stores and various acquisitions, and they are public.
It's the 21st century object sales fallacy. Significant returns only exist at scale and you can't compete with capital, so what's the point of starting a venture in object sales today? It's default-dead in the face of its eventual competition, unless you have some angle like lockdown on the object sourcing through extremely complex objects, unassailable distribution or some alternative revenue model.
I mean the person growing the mango is most likely paying a few hundred bucks per mango, on the assumption that they'll get one or two every couple years if they keep it in a container, so in comparison paying a few hundred bucks a month and getting actual fruit is a pretty good deal.
The margin on fruit and vegetable is typically low so you’d need quite a high margin, small volume plan. Might be doable.
Also: people in climate A don’t really know how to eat something from climate B (“how to” meaning recipes, is this dessert or a staple, etc) so you’d end up with a small customer base. Not a bad thing for a small lifestyle business in a big city.
Perhaps you could grow some of these (at a very high price) in similar facilities that are used for the famous Japanese cube/square shaped watermelons that are given as gifts.
If not a market in the USA, maybe in the very luxury food segment in Japan and South Korea, in whatever sort of food retailers occupy the market niche that is even more expensive than Whole Foods.
We've received Harry & David gifts in the past and - if you're expecting exotic fruits - you'll be very disappointed. The presentation is beautiful, but getting 5 under-ripe pears wrapped in gold foil does not seem worth the $50 (including shipping) cost.
Most of their fruit really seems just slightly above grocery store quality (though I do live in California, so our fruit is good). The varieties may sound special, but they're often just a branded version of a common citrus, apple, or pear.
Pears are fruits that ripe after being picked from the tree. The photos in the web look like Decana pears, that are known universally as one of the top varieties of common pear.
Freshly picked from the tree are just hard and sweet, nothing special, but wait some days and wow... When the skin starts to feel soft at the touch, the flesh melts like butter and the juice drips from your mouth.
Is annoying to culture (must be pollinated carefully and the steams take strange directions that made it difficult to prune correctly), but is royalty in the pear world.
If yours were from that variety you should give it a second try, wait to middle of summer and taste one in their prime. Is just a pear, but it offers all that one can expect from a pear.
Presumably, you could grow god-tier mangoes year-round, right in the city, by simulating the right climate in fancy greenhouses - if you did it right, you wouldn't have an electric bill. If the mangoes really are as great as I've heard them described, I can imagine people would pay a huge premium for them. You could sell them to fancy restaurants, make ultra-luxury fruit baskets (I understand these are a big deal for Asians & Asian Americans), and eventually scale up to selling them to upscale grocery stores.