Kenny Malone

speaker

2,236 appearances 17 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 11 Sep

Kenny Malone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

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Planet Money · Branded fruit: How produce got “Honeycrisp-ified" · 28 Aug 2026 podcast

But uh y it is more than just that.

And to understand what else has changed, we called up Miguel Gomez of Cornell University.

Do you have a favorite vegetable or fruit?

Yes, we're right, Dan, of course.

But okay, why is this happening?

Well

Part of the story has to do with growers trying to escape this classic economic pitfall known as the commodity trap.

Sure, but to escape that trap, you need to find a way to differentiate your product, make your thing special somehow, and then ideally you can charge more for it.

And

Yeah, the Love Beats Company sells beats.

Uh they are packaged, they're well branded, they're often pickled or splashed with balsamic.

So, you know, slightly more than just like raw commodity beats, but also they are still just beats, to be clear.

Right.

There's no special patented genetics here.

Love beats is just carefully selecting beets, often dressing them up, branding them really well, and as a result, they have taken a commodity vegetable and can charge more.

That is, of course, the route the Scarlet Sunrise Tomato folks have taken.

But uh, we were curious, is there perhaps a limit to all this new produce creation?

Like especially when we think of like the poster children for all of this, the apples.

Yeah, Miguel says, uh, people don't seem to be eating like more apples in total.

So if you were to invent a new apple, you're just gonna be jockeying for space in that already crowded apple display.

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