Sweet, crunchy, and convenient, baby carrots are a delicious and easy option for a healthy snack. However, useful as they are, baby carrots didn’t exist until the 1980s, when one clever farmer who didn’t want his carrot crop to go to waste came up with a creative way to sell his excess produce.

Despite their name, baby carrots are not an immature version of a grown-up carrot, but rather they’re made from full-sized carrots that have been cut, peeled, and shaped. California farmer Mike Yurosek wanted a way to sell his unusually shaped and blemished carrots and found out that a green bean cutting machine was perfect for shaping them into uniform pieces.

Baby carrots first appeared on the market in 1987; Since then the process has become much more efficient, and any leftover scraps get turned into animal feed, meaning practically none of the veggie gets wasted. It is worth noting that baby carrots like the fiber and antioxidants found in the carrot peel, but they still contain lots of nutrients like vitamin A.