The Business of Everyday Things: How Oranges became a Consumer Good
When you walk into a supermarket, you find oranges all year round. Oranges are one of the staples of the food retail business in Europe. For this to happen, the costs of production and distribution have to be covered by the value that the fruit provides to us as a good. Through the history of the orange, we see the economic systems changing, let’s see how this came to be.
Published in
14 min readSep 16, 2019
The market today is not the same as it used to be.
The story of the orange begins in a completely different economic environment than we are familiar with today and ends in the supermarket we know. Today, we live in what is called economies of scale. Meaning increased production, and optimized processes aim at saving costs. This model benefits us, as consumers because it makes lower prices possible. For most of human history, the production output of economies was limited, goods were scarce and only available to the aristocracy, this is what we call subsistence economies. Let’s track the development of the orange from its trait as a luxury good to the…
