Have you ever heard of fruit leather? You know, that famous Syrian treat. Well, let’s learn how that became the iconic Fruit Roll-Up.
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us. But we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So, here’s one of those.
[A&A Roof Ad]
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, I’m Dave Young. Steve Semple is here with another story, and he told me that this episode’s going to be a two-parter because this product has two phases.
Stephen Semple:
It does.
Dave Young:
The invention phase and then sort of the suborbital stage one. But fruit roll-ups, or as we like to call it in Nebraska, the devil’s lettuce.
Stephen Semple:
The devil’s lettuce.
Dave Young:
No, that’s something else, nevermind. Fruit roll-ups.
Stephen Semple:
Fruit roll-ups.
Dave Young:
Man, I missed the… I mean, they were starting to come around out in Western Nebraska, you barely got fruit that wasn’t just ugly, let alone rolled up and put in a package. But I remember it came on big cellophane sheets.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. It’s a billion dollar product category today.
Dave Young:
Is it really?
Stephen Semple:
I could argue that probably just about every child has had one, right?
Dave Young:
Oh yeah. No doubt.
Stephen Semple:
It’s crazy, it’s crazy big. But I’m going to say most people probably have not heard of the company that invented them, because this isn’t a story about General Mills, this is a story about a little company that’s actually not been heard of much. The story starts with a Syrian baker in New York, who, quite frankly, sort of accidentally creates an entirely new snack category, and then watches somebody else build it into an empire. So, we’re going to do this, as I said, in two parts. So, this is part one, which is the origin of the idea of the fruit roll-up. So, it’s the early 1990s… Or 1900s, sorry, the early 1900s.
Dave Young:
Early 1900s. Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And-
Dave Young:
It goes way back.
Stephen Semple:
It does go way back. And Joseph Shalhoub & Sons is a small family bakery in New York, and they specialize in Middle Eastern pastries, and they introduce this one unusual product called amardeen.
Dave Young:
Amardeen.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it’s this traditional Syrian fruit leather. It’s pureed apricots, sweetened, sun-dried into large sheets, and sold by cutting the pieces from these large slabs.
Dave Young:
I remember the phrase fruit leather, yeah. Okay.
Stephen Semple:
And customers love it, but it’s another imported specialty food. That is until his son Louis Shalhoub comes along. Now, he started working in the bakery, like a lot of family businesses, at the age of 12, he’s an exceptionally talented baker, and he loves making new confections. Now, he served in the Korean War, and when he returns from the war, he has some bigger ambitions, he wants it to become more than just a neighborhood bakery. But when he returns from the Korean War, the business is facing some real challenges. There’s political instability in Lebanon and Syria, and this disrupts imports. So, their signature product, amardeen, is becoming hard to find. So, he decides we’ll make it ourselves. Problem is no one’s really done this commercially. The process is pretty primitive. You’re pressing the fruit, laying it out on cellophane, hanging it literally in sheets on a clothes line. Setting it out to dry.
Dave Young:
Yeah, so it can dry on both sides. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. So, it’s hard, it’s slow, it’s labor-intensive, but he works on it. He works on it, works on it, works on it. Because one of the things that he found is his homemade version has more flavor, better texture, less leathery, and frankly, it’s just a better product. He keeps working on it, and the other thing he realizes is people really don’t want these giant sheets, they want something more convenient. And if you think about it, this is kind of the same insight Norman Kraft had with the sliced cheese, right? How can we package this differently that makes it more convenient? So, he takes something that’s large, the sheets, and he makes it individual, portable, and convenient. He basically creates individually wrapped fruit rolls, takes a section, rolls it, wraps it. Now, it’s an entirely new snack, and he gives it a new name, he calls it Joray, J-O-R-A-Y, named after his two sons.
Dave Young:
Joray.
Stephen Semple:
Joseph and Ray.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Now, what he does in terms of first wanting to distribute this product, rather than trying to educate everybody, it’s a brand new idea, he starts with Middle Eastern grocery stores because they’re already familiar with the idea of this fruit leather.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So, this is just a better version of it. So, those customers already understand the product and the product gains traction. Now, then an unexpected thing happens, kids actually start playing with it. They wrap it around their thumbs, they chew it slowly, they stretch it. Kind of becomes-
Dave Young:
Sure. You make a mask out of it.
Stephen Semple:
I hadn’t even thought of that.
Dave Young:
That’s my favorite thing to do with it.
Stephen Semple:
So, the whole thing, it becomes kind of entertainment rather than just food. And it’s funny, children often invent variations of things, right?
Dave Young:
Sure. Yeah. Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Using Stories To Sell]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off, and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Stephen Semple:
The product is still around today, if you go to Joray, the website, it’s still there, it’s fourth generation, it’s still a Brooklyn-based manufacturer.
Dave Young:
[inaudible 00:08:07].
Stephen Semple:
It sells nationally through specialty retailers, kosher distributors, you can buy the product straight from the website. Their website talks about how every fruit roll is still handmade. They produce 10 flavors, it packages them in these 48 roll boxes, still owned by the family. The best estimate, because it’s privately owned, the best estimate that I was able to find is that they’re probably about a four to $5 million business, because it looks like they have about 15 to 25 employees. So, it’s still around.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
They had a degree of success.
Dave Young:
Still doing their thing.
Stephen Semple:
Still around. Yeah, still-
Dave Young:
It’s probably better than the big food version.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, I’m sure that it is. I’m sure that it is. It’s like, I’ve sort of decided that next time I’m down in Austin, I’m going to order some and have it shipped to the academy to try them out.
Dave Young:
Yeah, we’ll put it out on the snack table and yum yum.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, yeah, try it. We’ll do that then. So, now General Mills, we’ll talk about later, takes this idea and really grows it. And part of the reason why I want to talk about it is I think it’s an opportunity Joray missed. But Joray has been focused on this craftsmanship in this niche and really created this really cool product that we all know about, which is the fruit roll-ups. And really what it was about was taking this idea and packaging it just in a way that’s more convenient.
Dave Young:
Yeah. You don’t have to go to the bakery and it’s packaged, it can go into a convenience store, it can go into a lunchbox, it can do all the things that you can do with packaged food as opposed to fresh food.
Stephen Semple:
I remember one, I still do it now, you can grab something like that and you can put it in a coat pocket, so when you’re out with your kids, they’ve got a snack if they need one, and in this case, a healthy snack, which is really awesome. So, yeah, there’s all these benefits to the way he packaged it. And from the best I was able to find, he’s the first one to do fruit roll-ups. They basically invented the category, which is really cool.
Dave Young:
I’m guessing that it wasn’t something you could protect though, or was it?
Stephen Semple:
Probably not.
Dave Young:
When someone else decides to do it’s like, oh, I see. Yeah, we just dry some fruit and roll it up.
Stephen Semple:
One of the things that came up in the research, and I didn’t note it here, so I’m just going to have to go off of memory a little bit on it, but at one point when the product was taking off, he was interviewed by a magazine, and he spoke pretty precisely about here’s how they were doing it, and he had later regretted doing that because all of a sudden lots of copycats came along.
Dave Young:
Yeah, you just take the article and there’s the recipe.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And I think with a lot of these things, it’s really like what are you protecting? It’s fruit, it’s dried, it’s leathery… I think it’s hard to protect those things. It’s the name and it’s the brand and things like that that you can protect. He regrets a little bit doing that, but I think there’s an opportunity they missed. And that’s what we’re going to talk about when we talk about General Mills, when we look at what General Mills did to take this to the next level. But hats off to them. He looked at a product, when he did the changes, it was a better product, that was a bonus, but the big thing was how do we actually take this product and make it more convenient? How do we make this better for the consumer? Which is the cutting it, rolling it up, packaging it.
Dave Young:
Yeah, I love it, I love this story, and I enjoyed the product. We have probably the General Mills version now and in our snack table, but I don’t tend to eat that stuff now. But it is, it’s a fun thing for kids to play with, right? You say, “Don’t play with your food,” but it’s like, “Come on, it’s a fruit roll-up.” How do you not play with it? You’ve got to play with it to eat it. You got to unroll it and pull strips of it off, and it delightfully sticks to teeth, so dentists must love it.
Stephen Semple:
Oh yeah, I’m sure they do.
Dave Young:
Now, is this pretty much the story? Because I want to-
Stephen Semple:
This is pretty much the story for Joray. Yeah.
Dave Young:
All right, I’m going to take this in a political direction.
Stephen Semple:
Okay.
Dave Young:
Please forgive me. When you said he’s a Syrian immigrant in the early 1900s.
Stephen Semple:
Yes.
Dave Young:
In the early 1900s, an immigrant from-
Stephen Semple:
That’s his father, the father who started the bakery.
Dave Young:
Oh, he’s a second generation-
Stephen Semple:
He’s second generation, yes.
Dave Young:
But his father was an immigrant who invented it and he took it-
Stephen Semple:
Correct. Well, his father was the immigrant who imported it.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Do you remember, they were originally important?
Dave Young:
Oh, the [inaudible 00:12:59].
Stephen Semple:
The amardeen. He was importing the amardeen. And then when the amardeen ended up becoming hard to source, the son basically then figured out, well, how are we going to make this ourselves? And in the process of doing that, also figured out, oh, I could do this, I could actually package this in a better way.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So, Louis is the son who did these things, but the father came early 1900s as an immigrant into New York. Yeah.
Dave Young:
Middle Eastern immigrants in America.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
Giving us something that now all of the right-wing immigrant hating people are putting in their kids’ lunchboxes every day.
Stephen Semple:
Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much.
Dave Young:
I’m going to stop right there.
Stephen Semple:
Okay.
Dave Young:
People can just think about that because I could go on a rant, but I’m not going to do it.
Stephen Semple:
Okay. Well, we’ll get some hate mail even just from that comment.
Dave Young:
I’ll rant against General Mills in the next one.
Stephen Semple:
Okay, there we go.
Dave Young:
I don’t know why, but I’ll find something.
Stephen Semple:
All right, perfect.
Dave Young:
The devil’s lettuce. All right, fruit roll-ups and Joray.
Stephen Semple:
Joray.
Dave Young:
Joray.
Stephen Semple:
J-O-R-A-Y.
Dave Young:
J-O-R-A-Y. And it’s .com? Is that where you find it?
Stephen Semple:
Yep. Yep.
Dave Young:
Okay. We need to find that.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, we should order some.
Dave Young:
I feel like we’ve given General Mills plenty of our money, give some to the family that invented it.
Stephen Semple:
There you go.
Dave Young:
Love it.
Stephen Semple:
All right. Awesome.
Dave Young:
Thanks, Stephen.
Stephen Semple:
Thanks, David.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.
