December 2019 - 16

duets
BY PETER KONJOIAN AND WILL HEALY
Managing Product Assortment Shrink:
New Genetics vs. Time-Tested Varieties
Peter Konjoian is president of Konjoian's Horticulture
Education Services Inc. His career spans four decades as a
commercial grower, researcher and consultant. Will Healy is
senior technical and research manager for Ball Horticultural Co.
Konjoian can be reached at peterkfes@comcast.net.
J
oining me this month is Will Healy,
senior technical and research
manager for Ball Horticultural Co.,
where he has worked for the last 28
years. Prior to joining Ball, Will was the
state floriculture Extension specialist
at the University of Maryland (19841991)
and Colorado State University
(1981-1984). He received all of his
degrees (bachelor's, master's, Ph.D.)
from the University of Minnesota where
he worked with Harold Wilkins' group of
students. Will has researched a diverse
assortment of crops studying the effect
of light, nutrition and temperature on
growth and flowering. He has worked
with growers around the world and
brings a unique set of experiences to
today's topics.
Peter: Welcome Will, thank you for
taking time to join me. The two of us have
been active in our industry for decades
and have accumulated many experiences
and observations. Please start the
conversation with your perspective on
plant genetics and variety assortment in
the health of our businesses.
Will: I was cleaning out some files
recently and ran across a 1977 list of
" Ball Super Seedlings " with 38 variety
names still in use today! Some are triedand-true
varieties, but some should
16 DECEMBER 2019 GPNMAG.COM
have been retired years ago if you look
at the incredible improvements that
have been made in the last 42 years.
During the 1990s, we experienced a
" Field of Dreams " where breeders were
developing world-class improvements in
germination and flowering uniformity as
well as introducing plants we have never
seen before that have revolutionized our
product assortment, i.e., calibrachoa. If
we look at the yield improvements over
the last 10 years, new genetics have
increased germination and rooting yields
15 to 20%. Growers now have varieties
that germinate more uniformly with higher
yields just by dropping old varieties.
Peter: The edible crop side of our
industry mirrors your comments about
ornamental crops, Will. After shifting my
research focus to hydroponic vegetable
and herb systems, it became clear that
cultivar selection is critical in high density
controlled environment agriculture
(CEA) systems. Poor choices result
in challenging production conditions.
Even with the vast assortment of edible
crop cultivars currently available we
need new material bred specifically for
CEA systems. Therefore, an important
questions arises: How should growers
navigate the ever increasing number of
cultivar choices?
Will: That's a good question, Peter.
Since 1977, our industry has continued
to innovate but at the expense of " how do
I manage this assortment? " Since 2000,
we have tripled the number of varieties
that Ball Seed offers - even though Ball
only offers a portion of what is available
worldwide. A more stunning statistic is
we replace 20% of the varieties every
year with innovative replacements!
We must start thinking of our industry
as a new product development industry
and use the concepts and tools that our
competitor industries (food, paint, etc.)
use to manage their assortments. One
strategy is to use the " long-tail " product
development concept. The figure below
shows how the long-tail concept works.
When assessing your product assortment,
you rank your products by popularity
(sales $, margin $, units sold, etc.) on the
y-axis and rank them in descending order
on the x-axis. This clearly shows your
high-demand, high-value products that
you keep. Annually, you assess the " long
tail " products, which are the products on
the right end of the curve.
Annually drop the lowest 15 to 20%
of the products that haven't increased
after three years (moved to the left) and
declined (moved to the right). The goal
of the long-tail process is to find new
products that move to the left rapidly
Popular products
Long Tail
Products
Medium.com
Popularity
http://www.Medium.com http://www.GPNMAG.COM
December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2019
