Customers pay double for leftover lettuce in a bag

SOLEDAD, Calif. -- In a field near Salinas, two teams of workers move through the muddy rows behind harvesters on a recent morning, scooping up heads of lettuce, peeling off the bushy outer leaves and chopping off their stumpy bottoms.

Both are picking iceberg lettuce for their employer, Dole Fresh Vegetables Inc. But while one team is carefully selecting the most eye-pleasing specimens, the other is grabbing just about everything in sight, even the smaller or misshapen heads that years ago would have been left in the field.

It's these leftovers that customers will eventually pay double for, once they are washed, cut and sealed into plastic bags for sale in the produce aisle as salad. Even as head lettuce prices recently hit 12-year lows -- the result of a flurry of new planting after the spring lettuce shortage -- bagged salad prices didn't budge.

Salad prices have held relatively steady for years, as companies such Dole Food Co. and its chief competitor, Fresh Express, which together control about two-thirds of the $1.6 billion bagged salad market, have determined how much consumers are willing to pay for convenience.

A brand, not a crop

One of California's most volatile commodity crops is quickly turning into a consumer good whose consistency is as predictable and stable as floor wax or pretzels.

"We're no longer in the farming business," said Tom Loveless, a senior vice president with Fresh Express's parent, Dallas-based Performance Food Group Co. Now, he said, "we sell a branded line of products."

A decade after the first bagged salads began landing on supermarket shelves, these products use 40 percent of the lettuce grown in California's Salinas Valley, the nation's largest lettuce-growing region.

At Dole, lettuce heads roll down an assembly line just like any other packaged food before they are cut to size, mixed with pre-measured spurts of other types of greens and cabbage, washed and vacuum-packed. Some analysts contend that fresh fruits and vegetables shouldn't be processed, sealed up and turned into slickly marketed products, but others say consumers can't get enough. They want fresh foods but expect it to be as convenient, safe and predictable as anything they get out of a can or box.

Big agricultural businesses that used to farm Monterey County's rich but expensive land now are processors, buying and maintaining expensive equipment and paying growers a set amount per season, per pound.

Paying for convenience

Initially a hard sell, bagged salads have become a favorite of supermarket retailers. The product is more lucrative than head lettuce, requires less labor to maintain on the shelves and can be kept on the shelf longer, thanks to its special packaging.

Because consumers who buy bagged salad expect to pay more for the convenience, manufacturers and retail chains don't feel the same pressure to discount the items as they do bulk produce.

And unlike a head of lettuce, which can sit in consumers' crispers for six days and lose freshness, a bagged salad can sit for a couple of weeks.

Shoppers routinely pay double for that kind of convenience. Dole officials say most shoppers don't look to see how the price of bagged salad relates to that of bulk lettuce.