Guess we have time to break into the third fun topic we wanted to cover: scifi fruit. We were going to review Rumble’s music section this week since we’ve spent a month on YouTube, but it takes about 5 minutes to figure out that’s not an actual thing since they don’t appear to have set it up. Oh well, sometimes you guess wrong. It’s too bad since they have that cool green Matrix theme. Moving on.
The idea came from Animazement guest lecturing days and community theater, scifi’s favorite fruit is always the pitaya or dragon fruit family so let’s start there. Golden or yellow dragon fruit with the spines removed are in our opinion the best, but there’s a lot of different varieties. Joe Rogan’s ancient alien archaeologist guests constantly get on his podcast and talk about what is this “pine cone” that ancient deities seem to be carrying when you can literally walk in almost any American grocery store and find it in the fruit section including Wal-mart forever. Asia also likes dragon fruit. It’s something cool we share with China. They have the whole dragon theme going in 2024 which is just brilliant marketing. Our commercial point: If we were in the fruit business there’s definitely a leverage branding point that is NOT being exploited with both the scifi space and the ancient alien trends.
Yes, we love dragon fruit. No, we don’t have a farm, but “Got Dragon Fruit?” seems like a doable marketing strategy. Dragon fruit is a fast growing cactus which seems to do well in the Americas as a hanging container plant or patio container, but most people associate it with Vietnam due to the French importing it in the 1800s. It’s in season from June through September. You can pick it up on Etsy or most plant stores for under $20.
Growing dragon fruit is interesting, but not the scifi leverage point we wanted to discuss. Any gardener can grow dragon fruit, tomatoes, or whatever. You also see it farmed professionally in dryer regions that have bananas. Say 30-90 fruits/year a plant in dryer regions? 1600 plants per acre? It is popular in Texas and the Midwest at scale although you see it all over the US/Americas. The scifi commercial point comes in with the space program. Yellow dragon fruit is said to be a blessing of good luck. Given the Texas and Florida dragon space programs, can you imagine a family associated with both country and fruit like the Doles rolling out something like this in Austin, TX and Miami, FL? Or maybe an asian fruit family? You’d need a number of moving parts from a country music songwriter or two to create an album, a packaging plant to turn the fruit into jam, canned products, and a local restaurant or two in those cities to create fun recipes for press marketing. Lucky dragon drinks? Ice cream? Alcohol? What a blessing for the tourism industry down there. And grocery stores? We were going to do an AI music busking tie in here with grocery stores and Whole Foods, but Amazon isn’t doing busking so no dice. Someone else? You could also put it in the space station gift shops. Maybe China and Russia would also like this too. This is probably licensing more than anything else since all the technology already exists. Call red dragon fruit jam "Dragon's Breath" or something clever. Dragon fruit is currently made into jam, but not commercially at scale so this isn't reinventing the wheel or going out on a limb from a technical standpoint. A new Welch's grape jelly. It is also sold in bulk as both a powder and drink mixer on Amazon for under $20. What is missing is a professional chef kitchen to do some food testing with the marketing department for summer tourist branding. It would be a blast. Anyways, if you want the idea, it’s yours. It’s just something we thought people would like. Have a great week everyone.