"People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled."
Try growing some carrots of your own. Way cheaper than buying them, gives you a sense of pride in your own work, really easy to grow, basically just requires sprinkling seeds in the spring and pulling them out of the ground and washing them off when they get big enough.
I stopped buying baby carrots when I found out that they are just big carrots cut down. They aren't picked early or anything. Thus, a lot of waste is created to make baby carrots.
According to the article, baby carrots were invented to reduce waste. Carrots grow into all sorts of shapes and sizes, but supermarkets only buy a narrow range; the rejects get used for animal feed, or factory food. With baby carrots, more of the carrot gets eaten by humans—and presumably the stuff that's cut off is still sold the way the rejects used to be.
Single, dual, multi-blade or electric? Seriously, do you go for the clean contoured shave or multifaceted polygonal surfacing? Is a shave effectively different from peeling?
Indeed, my time while waiting on some cooking process is effectively free to me [I'm already spending it a) cooking and b) listening to a podcast]. So I work things like peeling and cleaning carrots into that time.
I wonder if perhaps the slump in sales is the cause of slimy carrots rather than the effect. It sounds like they were dumping carrots into the pipeline at a tremendous pace, and it sounds like every carrot farmer has added "baby carrot" tracts to their farms so they could push them out faster. What if there became a huge glut in the market for these overpriced carrots, and they ended up sitting on the shelves longer...baby carrots are freshly peeled and washed and still moist when packed, and the longer they stay wet in the refrigerator, the more slimy they become.
Slimy carrots are unappealing, thus they ended up staying on the shelves even longer and selling even slower.
I buy baby carrots, and they are not always slimy. It's about 50/50, in my experience, and it depends on where I buy them, as well. I travel full-time, so in the past year I've bought baby carrots in a couple dozen cities. It varies widely. Organic produce, including baby carrots, from Trader Joe's or Henry's or other natural foods type markets tend to be better, though not always. And produce purchased in small towns and towns far from big civilization (like in Alaska or the desert or mountains) is consistently of lower quality and not as fresh.
I don't know that "the pipeline/process" is to blame, though supply chain management might be. If they've got twice as many baby carrots as the market wants, and they let them sit on shelves for days or weeks before they hit the supermarket shelves, I can see that leading to a self-reinforcing problem.
