Profiting By Peeling And Slicing Fruits And Vegetables

I first noticed this kind of product when my niece brought home a plastic bag full of sliced vegetables. There were sliced string beans, eggplants, pumpkins and other vegetables which made up a certain vegetable dish our household regularly cooks.

I can see the benefits to both the buyer and seller of this type of product which is just a mixed bag of assorted fresh vegetables but could be very profitable. I could also add slicing and peeling services for fruits and vegetables be added to this profitable service.

It is important to know the advantages to the buyer when they are buying peeled and/or sliced fruits and vegetables. This determines the probable profitability of your sliced and peeled fruit and vegetable product.

To make my example more clear, my niece brought the sliced and peeled ingredients of a famous Philippine vegetable dish which is regularly eaten by Filipinos. The mere fact that this simple vegetable mix exists is a proof of how well this product is selling.

I didn’t only see this vegetable mix in the Philippines. I also saw a similar vegetable mix being sold in Australian vegetable shops and supermarkets. I can see a day when big corporations would step in to capitalize on the popularity of these vegetable mix products.

In fact this is already happening. I have seen vegetable mixes composed of very small pieces of frozen carrots, corn ears, and peas being sold in supermarkets. I have also seen the combination of frozen slices of carrots, green and white broccoli, and so on.

People Just Want To Eat Or Cook And Not Peel And Cut:

Perhaps the greatest advantage to the buyers of such services would be convenience. There are just some fruits and vegetables that are hard to cut and peel. I can name pineapple as an example.

There are a lot of people who want to eat fresh pineapples but do not because they do not want to peel and cut them. There are manual pineapple peeling machines, but the one I found is not efficient and peels deep in the pineapple’s skin resulting in a lot of waste.

But the alternative of using a plain knife to peel a pineapple is not much worthwhile to a person who is not an expert in peeling and cutting pineapples. The same goes for other fruits and vegetables.

This is why people would rather pay extra money rather than peel and cut their fruits and vegetables. It saves them time and not really needed work in being able to eat or cook their fruits and vegetables.

I am a person for example whose eyes become irritated when peeling and slicing onions. That is why I would rather buy peeled and sliced onions than do it myself. Many people in fact suffer from this reaction to onion and with one’s eyes.

To make a long story short, buyers of peeled and sliced fruits and vegetables just want to avoid the wasteful use of time and energy in peeling and slicing fruits and vegetables when they only need to pay a small amount of money for such services.

Imagine If You Are A Big Restaurant Or A Food Company:

Do not underestimate the value of convenience to a customer especially if you scale things up. If you own a restaurant or a food business and you pay people to peel and slice fruits and vegetables for you, then you will be familiar of just how much it costs.

You could be operating and maintaining expensive peeling and slicing machines as well as paying people to operate them. You have maintenance, electricity and other costs associated to the machine. You also need to pay your human machine operators a salary and benefits.

Perhaps this is more evident in medium scale businesses who cannot afford to buy expensive peeling and slicing machines or pay employees to peel and slice fruits and vegetables for them.

That is why if you are in the business of peeling and slicing fruits and vegetables or even meat, you should target these companies whose food volumes are not high enough that they would justify the purchase of expensive peeling and slicing machines as well as paying for full-time employees.

People Want To Save Money With Mixed Vegetables And Fruits:

Another obvious benefit buyers get from these products is that they save money. Instead of having to buy the fruits and vegetables whole, they get to taste a limited serving of an assortment of fruits and vegetables which are just enough to satisfy their cravings.

This is especially helpful to single people and small families. The old and still normal way for these people to buy their fruits and vegetables was to buy them whole or in big slices where the buyer does not consume them readily.

As a result, the fruit or vegetable gets stored in the refrigerator for a long time and is likely forgotten until they rot and gets thrown away. This is especially true in developed countries where fruits and vegetables tend to be sold in larger quantities.

Let us take for example cabbages, when I was in Australia, cabbages were only sold in two sizes. You either buy cabbages in whole or in half slices. This didn’t go well with me being a single person, I usually ended up having to throw unused cabbage.

This is because cabbages don’t stay fresh very long even in a refrigerated state. They don’t taste very well also once they have been refrigerated. This must be the reason why vegetable sellers sell them in big sizes.

Now that we have discussed why the simple service or product of selling fruits and vegetables peeled and sold in smaller pieces can be profitable because there is a good demand from people who eat and cook fruits and vegetables, let us look at its other advantages to the sellers this time.

Using The Good Parts:

When I was in a vegetable market in the Philippines, I saw cabbage vendors peeling the outer skins of cabbages because apparently this part of the cabbage is usually damaged and is not delicious.

I also saw the same thing in Australia. I also saw a vegetable seller peeling the outer skin of a cabbage. Even some people I know do this. This is because again according to people I know, the outer skin of a cabbage is not really that appetizing to eat.

Imagine my surprise one time in the Philippines when I saw a documentary on television about people gathering these outer skins of cabbages from the vendors who discard them. They then use them as ingredients for their food.

This is a very ecological way of using fruits and vegetables instead of putting them in the garbage bin where they would eventually end up in the garbage landfill where they would rot and release methane which would pollute the environment.

I also saw a documentary where misshapen fruits and vegetables are just thrown out or left to rot in the grounds of a farm just because they do not look like the ‘ideal’ size or shape for a fruit or vegetable.

A good use for these misshapen fruits and vegetables would be to peel and slice them up into smaller pieces. Farmers and owners of large plantations of fruits and vegetables stand to benefit from these usually wasted misshapen fruits and vegetables.

Sell Smaller But With A Higher Margin:

This selling strategy is so common it is an open secret. Usually, the customer pays more in terms of quantity for smaller servings of everything. This applies to almost all kinds of products. These products could be food, personal hygiene products and so on.

But this strategy requires study before it can be implemented. You need to know first the most popular quantity customers are willing to buy as well as the amount that they would pay for it. You find this information on a gradual basis.

Let us use the watermelon as an example. You want to find out if you would make greater profit if you sold watermelon in smaller pieces. The first thing you need to do is to cut the watermelon in half and into other smaller pieces.

You first sell the watermelon according to a price ratio with a higher margin for the smaller pieces. Gradually you would be able to determine at which size you would make the most profit and concentrate your efforts on this size range.

I once saw a poor pricing strategy in my opinion of a certain product I bought. To make a long story short, they were selling a certain product at a certain price. They were also selling the same product at double the size and price.

As you can see, there is no advantage for a buyer to buy the double sized product when they can get the same benefits price wise in buying the smaller version of the product. For this company to persuade the buyers to buy the larger sized product, they have to lower its price for one.

Thinking Of The Customer’s Budget:

This particularly applies well to people in developing countries or for customers with just a limited budget. There are many products in developing countries which are continually repackaged into smaller sizes the nearer they are in customer’s hands.

When packed mixed vegetables were still not popular, my family used to cook a large quantity of our mixed vegetable dish. Now that packaged mixed vegetables are popular, my family has been programmed to cook only according to the quantity of the mixed vegetables.

You might say that our eating habits have changed. We have learned to cook according to what the supermarket or vegetable store mixed vegetable dictates. I just realized this just now. Imagine how much of our eating habits are dictated by supermarket and food vendor’s portions.

This is good news for food manufacturers and packagers. With their customers being content to certain food sizes, they can simplify their processes especially in the packaging department. This allows them to save money.

Leveraging:

This is especially good for those who sell mixed vegetables. It is well known that the prices of fruits and vegetables fluctuate. The packers of mixed fruits and vegetables can reorder the quantity of fruits and vegetables in their product mixes to let them stay profitable.

My mother noticed this one time when she was buying her regular bag of mixed vegetables. It so happens that she knows during that day that the price of a certain vegetable has gone up considerably.

And sure enough, when we looked at her bag of vegetable mix, the packer of the vegetable mix has put almost none of the currently most expensive vegetable mix. We understand why this happened.

The packer did it to remain profitable while still enabling us to eat our favorite bag of vegetable mix. This does not only happen with fruits and vegetables, it also happens with other food products such as snacks, meat and so on.

I was surprised that even mangoes are now being sold in a variety of peeled and sliced quantities. What surprised me the most was ripe mangoes were being sliced three ways and being sold.

The ripe mangoes were not peeled and cut in a way that the middle bone part was separated from its two fruity sides. I have not seen a machine capable of efficiently cutting ripe mangoes this way. They are usually done by hand.

This just shows you the variety of industry needs for peeled and sliced fruits and vegetables. There is also a huge market for fruits and vegetables that have been turned into powder. This shows the viability of a peeling and cutting business.

Peeling and slicing fruits and vegetables could be a good business especially if you can offer a variety of ways to peel and slice fruits and vegetables. There is a global market for peeled and sliced fruits and vegetables.

Buyers like the convenience as well as the money saving properties of such products while sellers can use fruit and vegetable parts that might otherwise go to waste, sell smaller but at a higher margin, satisfy the customer’s budget and of course leverage prices of the individual parts of their mixed products.

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