Cranberries Reinvented

To Appeal to Kids, to Add to Cocktails, Somebody Said, 'Let's Pick Them While They're White.'

Stephen Lee, a fifth-generation cranberry grower in Chatsworth, N.J., remembers the year the Ocean Spray research and development guys asked him to do something really weird.

For 135 years, since his great-great-grandfather arrived from Ireland, Lee's family had harvested cranberries in October when they turned a deep, glossy, garnet red. The price he was paid per barrel was based, in part, on how deep and richly colored his berries were. Berries that were too pale or, God forbid, white, were rejected. That was how the cranberry business had worked since its beginnings in the early 1800s.

But in 1998, Ocean Spray asked Lee Brothers Inc. and a handful of other New Jersey growers to send them white berries -- the "snowballs," as the growers derisively call the young, pearly fruit that hasn't matured enough to turn red. Instead of harvesting all their cranberries in October, in time for Thanksgiving, the selected growers would harvest half of their crop the first week of September, before the berries had colored up. The growers may have thought this sounded nuts, but they did it anyway. And for good reason.

The cranberry business in the late '90s was foundering. With a glut of berries, growers were being paid less for their fruit. Worse, cranberry products weren't winning over any new customers, so sales were stalled. Ocean Spray, a cooperative of 925 growers that was formed in 1930 and controls 80 percent of North American cranberry production, needed something new, exciting and profitable to sell. The white berries -- with their clear juice and milder flavor -- held that promise.

After all, cranberry execs had seen the grape juice business get rejuvenated with the introduction of mild, white grape juice aimed at children. And bottled waters -- the ultimate clear beverage -- were huge.

On the other hand, they had also seen clear versions of other beverages -- Crystal Pepsi, for example, and Miller Clear -- tank faster than a stone dropped into a flooded cranberry bog. Crystal Pepsi had been such a flop, it rated a 1994 "Saturday Night Live" parody for "Crystal Gravy," a dubious, clear gel for dipping turkey drumsticks.

Still, the future course for cranberry juice seemed clear. Literally. So after three years of development, white cranberry juice was introduced nationally in January 2002.

Not quite two years later, Ocean Spray is calling it the company's best product introduction in years. Sales have rocketed to $100 million as of August and growers are amazed and grateful for two distinctly different reasons: kids and cocktails. As expected, young families like white cranberry juice because it doesn't have the red's tart bite and doesn't stain the carpet. What was unexpected was how bartenders embraced the new juice to make clear cosmopolitans and other drinks in bars from Cape Cod to California.

White cranberry juice was served for the first time at an Ocean Spray board meeting in 2000.

"As grower members, we got to taste it because we had to make the decision on whether to spend money promoting it," Lee remembers. "It was not terribly well received."

But then growers, he admits, "are a little slow to embrace change [and] drinking this pale juice was just so different. More than the color, it had an entirely different taste. Smoother, less of a zing."

Even harvesting the white berries was different. The berries are white for only a narrow window of time -- about two weeks -- so growers and their employees have to hustle to get them all picked. Even the appearance of the berries floating in their flooded bogs bothered Lee. "It looked like a sea of popcorn," he grumbled. "I'm used to seeing a sea of red berries against a blue sky."

However, to Stewart Gallagher, Ocean Spray's chief marketing officer, white cranberries were the lure for the all-important younger consumers.

"One of the challenges of red cranberry juice is its tart flavor. Kids and younger consumers are not heavy drinkers of red cranberry juice. The red user is typically 40 to 55 years old with either teenage kids or no kids," he says. White cranberry juice beverages -- including white-peach and white-strawberry blends -- are more likely to be consumed by those around 35 and in households with kids under 12 or in larger families, says Gallagher. "The household that would typically buy white grape juice and apple juice will buy white cranberry juice," he says.