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A baby carrot is a carrot grown to the "baby stage", which is to say long before the root reaches its mature size. These immature roots are preferred by some people out of the belief that they are superior either in texture, nutrition or taste. They are also sometimes harvested simply as the result of crop thinning, but are also grown to this size as a specialty crop. Certain cultivars of carrots have been bred to to be used at the "baby" stage. One such cultivar is 'Amsterdam Forcing'.
In North America the term is more commonly applied to carrot-shaped slices of peeled carrots, invented in 1990 by Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, as a way of making use of carrots which are too twisted or knobby for sale as full-size carrots. Yurosek was unhappy at having to discard as much as 400 tonnes of carrots a day because of their imperfections, and looked for a way to reclaim what would otherwise be a waste product. He was able to find an industrial green bean cutter, which cut his carrots into 5 cm lengths, and by placing these lengths into an industrial potato peeler, he created the baby carrot. In 2006, most baby carrots come from Bakersfield, California, and make up a third of sales of fresh carrots in the United States. Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms are the world's two largest growers, processors, and shippers of baby carrots.
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