This photo means more than what it shows. Taken on Dr. Frieda Rapoport Caplan’s birthday, it shows her beside an overflowing bucket of Dragonberry Dahlias, flowers with a story of their own. When Dragonberry moved into Canby in 2013, Amy Nguyen bid for and won the right to name a new variety at the auction of Swan Island Dahlias, the town’s celebrated grower. She chose a bloom that refuses to settle on a color, not quite pink, not quite red and named it for her company’s first year in its new hometown. The next summer, a bucket went to Los Angeles for Frieda’s birthday.
That’s the story of Dr. Frieda Rapoport Caplan, who founded Frieda’s Specialty Produce in Los Angeles in 1962, the first woman-owned produce wholesale company in the United States.
She is best known for importing and naming the kiwifruit, transforming the obscure “Chinese gooseberry” into a household American staple, and she introduced more than two hundred specialty fruits and vegetables to American shelves while mentoring a generation of women in an industry that had room for almost none.
Two birds, the same path
For Amy Nguyen, who founded Dragonberry Produce in 2004, exactly forty-two years after Frieda founded hers, the parallel was a road map.
Dr. Frieda Caplan
Kiwi
The Kiwifruit
Named it, made it American, from “Chinese gooseberry” to household fruit.
42 yrs
apart
Amy Nguyen
Lychee
The Golden Lychee
Naming it, making it American, a Vietnamese harvest on two continents.
Frieda made her name with the kiwifruit. Amy is making hers with the Golden Lychee. The Dragonberry Dahlia is the acknowledgment in flowers of a debt that does not always get formalized.
A pioneer who did not have to show up, showed up.
On December 6, 2014, Frieda flew up from Los Angeles with her daughter Jackie Caplan Wiggins, then the company’s COO, to be guest of honor at Dragonberry’s tenth-anniversary celebration at Portland’s RiverPlace Hotel. She was 91. “Everyone was so excited to come and meet her,” Amy told The Produce News that week, “as she was the first lady of the produce industry.” A pioneer who did not have to show up, showed up.
At that celebration, Amy described the company she intended to build: “premium first-class quality that surpasses the ordinary.” Twelve years on, the sentence still sits in Dragonberry’s brand language. Frieda passed in January 2020, at 96. The path continues.
