Food & Wine via Instagram
If Justin Timberlake had been born 11 months later, we’d have another food trend to blame on millennials. Alas, he was born Jan. 31, 1981, and, according to the Census Bureau, those born in 1982 serve as that generation’s vanguard. But back to the culinary innovation in question: braspberries.
The portmanteau means just what you’d think it would (unless you’re picturing, like, a laboratory petri dish), much in the way that, say, avocado toast, does, consisting of blueberries and raspberries smushed together in the do-it-yourself manner that their physical attributes might suggest — and as singer-songwriter-actor Timberlake did suggest, to the tune of nearly 5 million Instagram views.
The magazine Food & Wine reported that Driscoll’s, with its 90% share of the U.S. raspberry market, confirmed that bringing a braspberry product to market was genuinely in the works, but, labor-intensive as the process is, scale had proved a hurdle.
With economics thus on the table, let’s get University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers’s take:
‘People making fun of brasbperries are overlooking the demand-side benefits of complementarity and diversification, and the supply-side gains due to automation and comparative advantage.’