[5] According to Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod, they might include only a single type of apple, lettuce and onion.
[8] On the first day Caplan worked on the market floor, she saw some unsold portobello mushrooms and started trying to sell them.
[2] According to her daughter, Karen Caplan, she was eventually "credited with launching and promoting the California fresh brown mushroom market.
[5] Caplan told the Orange Country Register in 2015, "The other people on the market were only interested in high-volume items.
[2][5][7] Her father had to co-sign a loan for her to start her business; typically at the time, women in the US were unable to apply for credit themselves.
"[3][2][4] She opened the business on April 2, 1962,[6] and began by selling "four or five" items[7] and became "the go-to distributor for anyone offering something unusual.
"[1][10] In 1962, her first year doing business as Frieda's Specialty Produce, she began promoting kiwifruit, then known by the "offputting name" of Chinese gooseberry.
[5] Growers in New Zealand began to call the fruit "kiwifruit" in 1959,[11] and Caplan started selling it by that name.
[1] She recruited local chefs to create dishes with the fruit and gave out samples on the market floor.
[5] She sold the idea of carrying the fruit to the president of the Alpha Beta grocery chain by serving him and his produce supervisors a lunch featuring several courses of kiwifruit dishes.
[12] Because Caplan was so closely associated with its popularity, food editors started referring to her as "the Queen of Kiwi".
[1] After selling an order containing both root ginger and Jerusalem artichokes, which Mimi Sheraton credited Caplan for branding "sunchokes",[7] she received a complaint that customers, produce department managers, and grocery cashiers could not tell them apart, and that the sunchokes' shelf life was too short.
[2][5] She started packaging the sunchokes in 1-pound (0.45 kg) plastic bags to identify them and to improve shelf life, with a recipe attached, an approach which was unheard of at the time.
"[1] At one point Caplan, worried about whether it was possible to run out of new products to introduce and contacted a horticultural expert, who told her there were between 20,000 and 80,000 edible species and that only around 200 had ever been commercially developed.
[1] According to The New York Times, Caplan "[broadened] the choices available to American consumers by importing products from South America, Australia, Asia and elsewhere.
"[1] In 2015, Entrepreneur said that Caplan "forever changed the American produce landscape, and our palates by extension, by ushering edible oddities out of obscurity and into the mainstream.
[1] The Washington Post said she whetted "the American appetite for dozens of once-rare fruits and vegetables that today are commonplace in groceries, kitchens and restaurants.
"[9] The Los Angeles Times noted that she "broke the glass ceiling in the testosterone-doused produce world and forever changed the way Americans eat fruits and vegetables" and credited her with creating the specialty produce industry in the US, saying that she "almost singlehandedly created fruit and vegetable trends".
[2] University of California Cooperative Extension advisor Ben Faber, who works with specialty crops, said, "She changed our eating habits.
"[2] In 1990 the Los Angeles Times named her, along with Steve Jobs and Jane Fonda, among a dozen Californians who "shaped American businesses in the 1980s.
[5] The company's introductions to supermarket produce departments, in addition to kiwifruit, sugar snap peas and Jerusalem artichokes, include: jicama, blood oranges, guavas, shallots, Belgian endive, red seedless grapes, passion fruit, star fruit, jackfruit, many chili peppers including habaneros,[16] Asian pears,[16] many squashes including spaghetti squash,[16] Meyer lemons,[17] and fresh herbs.