A bicycle pump, a potato peeler and a clothes-peg. You might never think about it, but someone invented these things. The same is true for the bell pepper traffic light. Fresh produce trader Jan de Lange started these almost 30 years ago. “I was quite proud when I saw them on display in the US,” he says.
It really says it, in the AGF Primeur of 1988. “Mixed bell pepper from Jan de Lange from Bleiswijk a golden opportunity.” And Jan was very proud, he says. “Someone else once claimed he was the first, but he wasn’t, and I have that in writing.” The fresh produce trader is 79 years old by now and still remembers it well. “The late 1980s, we were already doing tomatoes in trays, and we did a lot with bell peppers. At one point, business wasn’t going very well, and we still had all sorts of colours in the warehouse. That’s when we started with a tray with three colours of blocked bell peppers and one white pointed pepper on top of them. It looked like a fruit bowl.” Jan took it to fresh produce trader Mulder, who decided to provide 40 Swedish customers with a box of mixed bell peppers. “The following week, I had to make 350.”
It might not seem very exciting nowadays, but a mixed packaging of bell peppers was a novelty on the market back then. Exporting was therefore not that easy. “To export bell peppers, you first had to go to an office at the auction for the correct forms. Four colours of bell peppers in one box, that was altogether wrong. We received an exemption for it. And then it just continued to grow.” The white bell pepper was removed quite soon. “That was a pointed pepper, so more difficult to pack. And the white pointed was scarce quite a bit, driving up the price too much. Red, green and yellow in film went much quicker, more easily and was cheaper.”
The mixed packaging became a success. “I’ve seen bell peppers with Jan de Lange printed on them in New York,” Jan proudly says. Yet it didn’t exactly make him rich. The idea was never patented. “I thought about that occasionally, afterwards, but I’m not the sort of man to pursue that, or to blow my own trumpet. We weren’t used to much, growing up. I never got any diplomas, and as the youngest of nine, I had to start working when I was 13. I could barely write my own name. We were poor as church mice, and didn’t need much to be happy…” In addition, he is richly entrusted with anecdotes about the traffic light history. “Even large companies ended up paying me the first prize on occasion. We had the right papers to supply class 2 to wholesalers, which made quite a difference in price. At one point, I got a complaint about the traffic light bell peppers, but it came from a customer I had never sold anything to,” Jan remembers. “The bell peppers were in the exact box I had made, but it didn’t say Jan de Lange. They had been supplied by a different fresh produce company.” The matter was eventually settled on the open day of the auction. “We had gone all out. There was an Austrian booth from an acquaintance of mine with a liquor business, so we had plenty of wine. There was a barbecue with six ladies, a bit of music. It was nice and pleasant, and there was a massive crowd. The Haluco gentlemen walked up to us to settle the matter. We received 5,000 guilders, which was a lot of money at the time. We used it to pay for the open day.”
Nowadays, Jan might have gone into marketing, advertising. That wasn’t an option in the past. “You just had to work very hard back then. If I arrived at the office at 6 in the morning, it would’ve been late. I was never home before 8 or 9 in the evening.” Jan is no longer active in the fresh produce trade, but he still has good ideas occasionally. “I’ve always had that. You want to keep busy, after all. For example, we once started trading celeriac, when the vegetable trade was calm. In the end, we did about 100 tonnes per day. That was an enormous amount back then.” And the well-known Holland-girl is also still linked to Jan. “We wanted to brighten up the bell peppers a bit. The Holland-girl was our brand from the start, it meant that it was good.” By now, Jan is busier with his garden, his children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren – three of them. “They occasionally come to me for ideas. And very occasionally I might come up with one. It keeps you occupied that way after all. Who knows what’ll happen.”
