![]() What you picture is a Driscoll’s berry: glossy, red, and heart-shaped, and firm enough to ship to the East Coast or to the Middle East and eat two weeks past the harvest date. Strawberries can be orange or white, the size of a pinkie tip, oblong, conjoined or bloblike, ecstatic, defiant, ungainly, unique. The maps resemble battle plans, with armies of trucks fanning out across the continent. A full load of strawberries is worth about fifty thousand dollars blueberries garner twice as much. An alarm goes off if a truck’s temperature deviates from an accepted range, if a truck stops for too long (in Las Vegas, for instance), or if security is breached. At the corporate offices, in a business park a few miles from Cassin Ranch, interactive maps mounted on the walls monitor every truck carrying Driscoll’s fruit in North America, some two hundred and fifty at any given time. Driscoll’s sells more than a billion clamshells every year it was Driscoll’s idea to put berries into clamshells in the first place. Otherwise, Miles told me, “we could be outflanked.” Driscoll’s berries are grown in twenty-one countries and sold in forty-eight since the nineties, the company has invested heavily in Mexico. In the eighties, beset by takeover ambitions from Chiquita, Del Monte, and Dole, Driscoll’s embarked on a new vision: all four berries, all year round. Produce is war, and it is won by having something beautiful-looking to sell at Costco when the competition has only cat-faced uglies. “I regret to say, as I worked for a competitor.” At ninety, Baum is retired, but when he tells people that he worked in strawberries and they say, “Oh, Driscoll’s?” he knows just how Salieri felt. “They’re the leaders,” Herb Baum, who for decades led the berry coöperative Naturipe, said. “We’re commonly referred to as the Evil Empire,” Allison Reiter Kambic, one of Miles’s daughters, told me ruefully. Though the farming is technically outsourced, the Reiters also own a farming company, run by Miles’s brother Garland, which grows about a third of Driscoll’s fruit. ![]() Miles Reiter is the chairman his family owns some seventy per cent of the company, which develops proprietary breeds, licenses them exclusively to approved Driscoll’s growers, and sells the fruit under one of the few widely recognizable brand names in the fresh section of the grocery store. berry market, including sixty per cent of organic strawberries, forty-six per cent of blackberries, fourteen per cent of blueberries, and just about every raspberry you don’t pick yourself. “This is not going to go forward.”ĭriscoll’s, a fourth-generation family business, says that it controls roughly a third of the six-billion-dollar U.S. “Microcracking,” he said, pointing out some barely perceptible brown spots, caused by moisture on the plastic packaging, that were marring the surface. Stewart held a 21AA176 up to his face and inspected it carefully. Before that can happen, though, the berries must conform to Driscoll’s aesthetic standards. With these consumers, unburdened by preconceived notions of what a white berry should look or taste like, Driscoll’s has a priceless opportunity: the definitional power that comes with first contact. Lately, however, Driscoll’s focus groups have shown that millennials, adventurous and open-minded in their eating habits, and easily seduced by novelty, may embrace pale berries. “I brought these to a wedding, and all the parents were telling their kids not to eat the white ones,” a Joy Maker remarked. grocery stores Americans, accustomed to an aggressive cold chain, typically fear underripe fruit. But although the company has been breeding whites for fifteen years, it has yet to introduce any to U.S. In some Asian markets, white fruit is coveted, and Driscoll’s has conducted commercial trials in Hong Kong. “It dates back to the seventeen-hundreds.” “It goes back to a variety called White Carolina, which is maybe the oldest strawberry variety still in existence,” Stewart said. The fruit, an unpatented variety referred to as 21AA176, was juicy and soft, mildly astringent but tropical, reminiscent of white tea. The Joy Makers watched expectantly as I tasted it. Phil Stewart, an affably geeky, sandy-haired strawberry geneticist, offered me a yellowish-white specimen with rosy stains, like a skinned knee when the blood starts seeping through. Before them was a table laden with plastic clamshells: red, white, and pink strawberries for the pipeline. One foggy May morning, the Joy Makers, a team of scientists employed by Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, gathered at its research-and-development campus, which is known as Cassin Ranch, in the small agricultural town of Watsonville, on California’s Central Coast.
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