December 18, 2008

Eat Your Almonds

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EAT YOUR ALMONDS….A new blog called On the Public Record is written by a “low level civil servant who reads a lot of government reports.” My kind of blogger! Today, LLCS brings to our attention the California Almond Board:

The good prices for almonds are the result of excellent work by the California Almond Board. The Almond Board has done magic and created demand for more than a billion pounds of California almonds in the past fifteen years. They have run marketing campaigns to get Americans to buy more almonds (“A can a day, that’s all we ask.” Do any of you really want a can of almonds a day?). They have created new almond drinks. They’ve introduced almonds into breakfast cereals. (Think back to the mid-nineties. Don’t you remember that breakfast cereals rarely had almonds in them?) California almonds have replaced and destroyed every other major source of almonds in the world. Right now on the Almond Board front page, they report happily that almonds are the number one nut ingredient in food.

This really is superior work by the Almond Board and I can only imagine that the walnut and cashew boards look on in envy.

Later, after a persual of their website:

They’re doing amazingly consistent high quality work and I wonder how that came about. Did they just happen to hire someone good, who built a good organization? Did that person love almonds or just doing good work? Coincidence that it was the Almond Board and not the Walnut Board or Citrus Board? Does everyone talk about almonds as the shining light of California agriculture because of some quirk of hiring and personality? Anyway, I don’t know what almond growers pay for the board (I assume some small percent of their price/piece), but they’re getting stellar value for it.

It sure seems to me that mixed nuts have a higher percentage of almonds (pronounced aamins, by the way, rhymes with famines) than they used to. Or is that my imagination? In any case, maybe the tofu folks need to hire away the guru behind the Almond Board’s success. It would make Ezra Klein happy, anyway.

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