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 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.)
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.
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.
For the same reason everything else is exported. Its value somewhere else is higher than its local value.
Sometimes it's better to have good wine and one less euro, than another euro and worse wine.
Oregon's berries are no joke.
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.
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.
Receiving a shipment like that would be a joyous monthly treat.
I can’t be the only one … can I?
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=cube+sh...
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.
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.
Therefore a fruit that plays in the major leagues and has nothing to envy from tropicals
https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-pawpaws-wild-fruit-midw...
There is also similar one that we call Custard Apple. Different islands may have different names for these fruits.
Not to be eaten in very big amounts in any case by their Annonacins (linked with Parkinson disease)
Where I grew up poor folks go to the market because it’s cheaper than a supermarket.
It is very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for individual farmers to beat supermarket prices any more, largely thanks to vertical integration within agriculture and food processing.
This means that by and large, the point of farmers markets now has to be mostly about what you declaim: "bourgeois bohème type". If you don't have much money to spend on food, you won't be buying it directly from farmers anymore. That's sad, and seems weirdly wrong, but that's one of the paradoxes of scale in an industrialized, fossil-fuel enhanced agricultural system.
There are companies working very hard at developing new variants of fruits and vegetables that grow faster, are less susceptible to pests, don’t get damaged as much in transit, look like what consumers expect them to look like (no matter what the reality is), and smell good. Unfortunately, taste is never there. For instance have you ever noticed how hard tomatoes skin is at the supermarket vs the ones you grow yourself or even the “heirloom” variety? Tougher skin is not very pleasant but they survive shipping better.
This is my hypothesis why fruits and vegs used to taste so much better. It’s gotten worse over time with each generation of hybrids.
Farmers select for traits that increase profit. Since most markets don't let customers actually taste the product, they aren't choosing to buy it on that quality, and no one in the commercial space is trying to optimize it.
Instead customers are buying fruit that LOOKS good - big, bright, colorful, blemish-free (survives transport without damage).
So farmers plant fruits that will look good, survive transport, and have large yields. Unfortunately optimizing those qualities tends to get you terribly bland tasting fruit.
Ironically - pre-industrial revolution, when most fruits were grown and consumed locally, it was the opposite - people tended to select for fruits that were good tasting.
Baby carrots are carved from disfigured (but otherwise edible) carrots, because otherwise most people won't buy disfigured carrots.
Real baby carrots are very nice, but tender roots from forked carrots (that would be otherwise discarded when are perfectly ok to eat), is a tradeoff solution and decent replacement
I'm thinking back almost 50 years ago, the Kilimanjaro base camp. Our group (traveling Johannesburg to London overland, Kilimanjaro was simply a stop along the way) bought an entire stalk of bananas. It sat there for some days as we ate the tiny but oh-so-tasty bananas. It wasn't finished when it was time to head out. When we stopped for lunch it was thrown away as it was an inedible mess. Admittedly, it had simply been sitting on a seat in a truck and the roads were bad, but bananas are pretty hard to protect. (And anyone trying to ship them out of there would have had to use the same roads.)
I used to like bananas, but after that experience grocery store bananas hold little interest for me.
Exactly this. Go back a century and the idea of eating exotic fruits like these was the only available to the wealthiest.
It's a shame in a way that bananas and the like have become ubiquitous, to the detriment of fruits which were locally available.
I’m happy to be able to eat a banana; merely sorry that the ubiquitous one is such a boring variety.
The consequences of the industrial monocrop banana will be solved soon one way or another: the cavendish is under attack and either it will be replaced or all bananas will go extinct. I suppose Hegel would have appreciated this example.
But we’re talking about mangoes and bananas and pineapples and calling those “tropical fruit” when there’s so many fruits in the tropics.
As you say, the “gros michel” cultivar is mostly dead commercially, although there are attempts to get a variant resistant to fungal disease.
I’d like to taste a Gros Michel some day.
My father told me he was 27 years old when he ate his first banana. This was in Canada in 1950.
For a couple of months after the wall came down it was impossible to find bananas. Germans love bananas!
In fact, there was a crisis of supply caused by the Panama disease infesting the plantations, and people were very unhappy with that, because they got so used to the fruit.
…assisted by the United States Marines, and in fact the origin of the term “Banana Republic”.
I was shocked by the tastelessness of the company name when the Banana Republic clothing chain opened up.
[1] in Spanish “cámaras de maduración”, not sure of the translation of this
But as you point out, they require a climate unavailable on the continent so have to be harvested unripe and transported a long distance. I should be amazed they exist at all.
This supply chain aspect operates both ways: pineapples are grown in Hawaii and shipped to the mainland; as a result the only pineapples I’ve ever eaten there are the big flavorless ones sold all around the country. Hopefully the small flavor-packed ones are still grown locally and just provided to locals.
It’s not just tropical foods either. Everything from tomatoes, melons, and grains to chickens and turkeys have been selected and modified for the needs of the supply chain. Although flavor, texture, and, I understand even nutrition has suffered, the net result is that there is a lot less hunger, so I have to consider it a net positive.
My hope is that widespread automation and cheap clean energy will allow more local production and make “small batch” varietals cheaper. And in such a world, instead of indiscriminately pouring herbicides and pesticides to protect the productive crops' robot labor can pluck the weeds and bugs individually from the crops which should improve the quality of the result.