The Perfect Fruit Read online

  “Just picture a brick wall with a hole in the center and on one side of the wall, there’s us with all this fruit,” Milton said. “And on the other side of the wall, there’s the retailer out in the produce section of the store. Well, it used to be that no matter how much fruit we shoveled through that hole, the retailer would keep up with us. If we were shoveling real fast, then he’d be on the other side of that wall grabbing fruit and putting it out in the store real fast. You could call the buyer and say, ‘Look, I’ve got all this fruit and we’ll give you a dollar off each box, but we really need to move it.’ And he’d say, ‘Okay, send it.’ ”

  While almost all of the products in a supermarket—crackers, mouthwash, canned soup—remain consistent and static from store to store, fresh produce is one of the few ways a store can distinguish itself from its competitors. This is why it’s almost always the first thing you see when you walk into the grocery store. Traditionally, fresh produce has been a loss leader, a hook that supermarkets knowingly lose money on to lure in customers. During strawberry season, for example, a store might stock up on strawberries and run an advertised two-for-one special, on the theory that people will come for the discounted strawberries and then stay to buy everything else at regular prices. This has been the supermarket way pretty much since the dawn of supermarkets, and traditionally produce buyers were receptive to letting the supply of fruit partially dictate what they ran on special. This time-honored strategy could be seen in the annual “plum-o-rama.” If California plum growers had more plums than they knew what to do with—as is the case by August in most years—then they shoveled the fruit through Milton’s brick wall, with produce buyers standing there on the other side taking all those plums—black ones, red ones, green ones, yellow ones, purple ones—and stacking them up in a prominent pyramidal heap just inside the store’s entryway.

  But over the years, the Wal-Mart way of “everyday low prices” for consumer packaged goods had also been rubbing off on produce departments. More and more, supermarkets wanted the produce section to pull its own weight. If every other section of the store was analyzed according to how much it netted the company per square foot, then the produce section would be analyzed in that way, too. Produce buyers started moving away from the inefficiency of having to react to the fluctuations in supply, and they started ordering according to what the spreadsheet told them. “Screw Mother Nature: Here’s how many plums we need and here’s when we need them.” The days of the plum-o-rama were fading.

  “So now it doesn’t matter how fast we’re shoveling fruit,” Milton said. “The retailer’s worked out how much fruit he can take and that’s how much fruit he’s going to take, period. The supply can speed up but he’s staying at the same pace. So we’ve got all this fruit stacked up against our side of the brick wall.” Seen in that light, the 20-percent drop in plum volume from over the previous few years was not so much a decline as a correction. It probably wouldn’t be the last one, either, said Milton. “We’ve got a ways to go. The volume we have now, while it’s dropped considerably over the past few years, still seems to be too high.”

  The second major change was the consolidation of supermarket chains, which were constantly under pressure from box stores and discount clubs.

  “How does the consolidation affect stone fruit?” I asked.

  The Ballantine field managers were starting to trickle in for the meeting. “You know, you should really talk to David Albert-son, the owner of Ballantine,” Kaprielian said. “His family’s been in produce a long time, and he could tell you about consolidation. He’s always saying, ‘Why can’t the stone fruit business be like OPEC? Why can’t we just tell them what they’ll pay?’ ”

  Later, I did catch up with David Albertson. We made plans to get dinner at a restaurant in Fresno that serves Armenian-Cajun cuisine. (Fresno has a big Armenian population and, apparently, a few Cajuns, too.) Albertson is something of an anomaly in California stone fruit. He was born in Boston and attended Harvard, where he played hockey well enough to continue after graduation as a semipro defenseman for the Phoenix Apaches. His family, who was in the produce business up north, got into citrus down in Florida and then took a stake in Ballantine in 1950. Eventually, they bought out the other partners. Albertson has lived all over the world tending to family business. He got into the juice concentrate business and, for a while, held a seat on the New York Cotton Exchange. He lives most of the year in Winter Park, Florida, where his wife, Judith, is an art consultant and dealer. When he goes to the Valley on Ballantine business, he stays in an apartment at a hotel near the restaurant. When I went to pick him up there, the hotel bar was filled with people attending a National Onion Association conference. A wide, genial man in his seventies, Albertson was wearing black suit pants and a light blue, open-collared dress shirt.

  At dinner I asked him about the idea of an OPEC for stone fruit—being able to control the volume and price of the fruit being sold to retail buyers. He smiled a grim smile and leaned back in the booth. First of all, he said, an OPEC of any kind was not possible in the United States; cartels and price fixing are illegal. Secondly, even if it were legal, collusion among the sales teams of the big packing houses would be next to impossible because none of them really trusted each other. The only sensible reaction to retail consolidation was an equal and opposite reaction on the industry end. It, too, had to consolidate.

  “Our industry is totally dysfunctional. It’s a classic case of reverse leverage.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t get it. His BlackBerry was buzzing on the table—bzzzt bzzzt—but he ignored it and started explaining. “When Ballantine went into business in the nineteen fifties,” he said, “Sanger had fifteen packing houses and Reed-ley had ten. That was twenty-five in just that area around there.” There were packing houses all across the southeastern San Joaquin then, some of them big and commercial, some of them little more than a sturdy table set up in the orchard. Over time, though, packing houses started consolidating to cut costs and to handle a larger volume of fruit. By the end of the 1970s, there were still dozens of smaller packing houses, but the industry was essentially controlled by a group of commercial packer-shippers called the Big Eight. Ballantine was one of them.

  Most of the sales filtered through the Big Eight, and with hundreds of retail buyers and brokers on the other side of that brick wall, there were plenty of people who were willing to take however much fruit the industry shoveled through. And there was plenty to shovel. As commercial packers, the Big Eight contracted with individual growers for the course of the season. A packer took a commission on each box packed and sold for its growers, so the system tended to reward volume. The more boxes you shipped, the higher your commission. It was a seller’s market, and the industry could afford to think in terms of volume.

  But by the mid-1980s, consolidation on the retail end was under way, and stores were just beginning to rethink the flow coming through that brick wall. How much fruit a store carried began to be dictated by the finance guys and not the produce guys, and the formula for stocking the produce section began to reflect that. Instead of reacting to supply—“California’s got a lot of plums right now, so let’s do an ad and run them on sale”—the retailers began to think, “How much do we need in this space to make such and such an amount?” Instead of more fruit, many buyers started asking for bigger fruit, and growers who wanted more control over how they navigated this shift in the business began to break away from the Big Eight and do their own sales.

  “Eventually, in the nineteen eighties and nineties,” David said, “you had—and I’m just making this number up—two hundred packing houses and two hundred sales companies, while over this same time, the opposite was happening on the buyer side, where you began to see consolidation across the board.” His Black-Berry went bzzzt bzzzt, but he didn’t look at it. He ordered tea and short ribs.

  It was starting to make sense. If, on the one hand, you had eight major packing houses responsible for selling most
of the stone fruit grown in the United States, and, on the other hand, you had dozens, if not hundreds, of fruit buyers in regional grocery chains, produce distributors, and independent brokers, then you had a situation in which the fruit growers had the advantage. But when you went from that setting to a setting in which you had hundreds of packing houses and sales companies and only a relatively few centralized buyers—Kroger buying Ralph’s and Whole Foods buying Wild Oats and so on and so on—then the buyers had the advantage. Reverse leverage.

  Buyers weren’t just using their leverage to influence volume and price. They were also dictating how the fruit was packaged. For years, stone fruit was almost always volume-filled in rectangular boxes: twenty-eight pounds of peaches or nectarines per box and twenty-five pounds of plums. The number of individual pieces in a box depended on the size of the fruit. But once retailers got the upper hand in the relationship, they started asking for all kinds of different pack styles: clamshells, Euro Boxes, Panta Packs, IFCOs, club pack bagged. Eager to close the deal, most sales companies and packers said yes, and they said yes so often that buyers began to assume that they could get the fruit packed in any style they could dream up—in sealed tennis ball cans if that’s what they wanted.

  “But everybody talks about this as if it’s the retailer’s fault, and it’s not, because we’re the ones making the sales,” Albertson said. Stores like Kroger’s were getting scrunched at every end by Wal-Mart and the club stores. And the only places it could make up the difference were in produce, meat, dairy, and flowers. “They have to turn the screws on the suppliers of those things, so that means that the people who supply fruit are negatively affected. On top of that, we’ve done a horrible job of managing the commodity.” Bzzzt bzzzt. “We’re completely inefficient. Some of these inefficiencies are just the cost of doing business—a plum is not a cash commodity like a soybean.” Or, David didn’t say, a carrot. “But some of these problems are due to fat in the supply chain. Too many carnivores out there. Too many marketers. Too many salesmen.”

  What ever the causes for this reversal in fortune, the bottom line could be seen in three related graphs: If you looked at a graph of the average wholesale price for a box of fruit from the 1970s until today, it would show a sawtooth pattern, up and down depending on the year. But if you looked at a graph of the industry’s costs—labor, fuel, equipment—it would go up and to the right, a steady increase over time. And if you looked at a graph showing the average retail price of fruit—what we pay at the store—it too would go up and to the right, a steady increase over time.

  “That is the story,” David said. “Box price stagnant. Costs rising. Retail price of fruit rising.” It was an environment that favored economies of scale. For the small-and medium-size growers, the writing on the wall was clear and bleak.

  Still, there was always hope for the new season. Spring was coming, and what happened in spring usually set the tone for the summer to come.

  SPRING

  1

  I TOOK LEITH up on her offer and flew back out in the spring—in February, actually, which in California felt like spring. February is the most important month for a breeder of stone fruit in California because it’s when most of the breeding happens. If the dormant trees have had plenty of winter chill hours, they tend to bloom out uniformly (and usually produce a stronger set of fruit later in the spring). Occasionally, if you’ve had a cold early winter, and you get mild temperatures starting in early February, everything may seem to bloom at once. This “flash bloom” doesn’t happen too often. But in January, a freeze had hit certain areas of the San Joaquin Valley. The freeze had destroyed a lot of citrus and avocados, but because peaches, plums, pluots, and nectarines had still been in dormancy, the cold had merely ensured that they slept a deep, hard sleep. By February, California’s stone fruit had had more than a thousand chill hours and emerged with a strong, uniform bloom. When I showed up, the air was warm and sweet, and just about all the crossing was finished. After several sun-up-to-sun-down seven-day workweeks, the Zaigers were all exhausted and slap-happy. Their trees were starting to blossom, which was pretty, but there wasn’t a whole lot for them to show me out in the orchards.

  Still, Leith met me one afternoon to give me a quick lesson in fruit breeding. We hopped on a golf cart and her dog Sadie climbed to sit astride us. Rain had just come through, and the orchards were muddy and quiet.

  On paper, the techniques used to breed stone fruit seemed pretty straightforward. The fruit we eat is the end result of pollination, the sexual fertilization of a plant. Peaches and nectarines are mostly self-compatible, which means they can fertilize themselves with their own pollen. So to cross peaches and nectarines, you have to emasculate their blossoms first. This way, they’re not able to pollinate themselves before you’re able to cross them with whichever pollen it is you want to cross them with. To emasculate a blossom, you have to strip it of everything but the pistil, the female sexual organs of the flower. You can do this in several ways. Pinching a blossom with your fingers is the simplest way, if not the easiest. You have to squeeze the blossom hard enough to get all the male parts but not so hard that you pull off the female parts, too. Some people find it less dicey to use tweezers.

  Plums, however, are almost entirely self-incompatible. That means that they cannot pollenize themselves and so need the pollen of another variety to set fruit. (This is why you never plant just one plum tree in your backyard.) This fact of life sours many growers on plums, because they have to worry not just about the variety of plum they want to grow and sell, but also about the pollinator for that variety. But for a stone fruit breeder, plums are a little less of a hassle during the crossing season because you don’t have to emasculate them. You still have to worry about bees getting to the plum trees with some other pollen, but to prevent that you can cover the trees with netting or, as some breeders do, build small houses around the trees.

  Let’s say you have a variety of plum called Victoria Sykes and you want to pollenize it with a variety called Jack Horner. Ideally, you’re able to time the cross in such a way that when the blossoms of Victoria Sykes are just opening to reveal the pistil inside, the blossoms of Jack Horner have not yet opened into flower but are about to. This is called the “popcorn stage,” because that’s what the blossoms look like. You pick the popcorn blossoms off Jack Horner and grind them through a sieve into a container. You let the pollen in the container dry for a day or so, then you take a mascara brush (or your finger) and you brush Jack Horner’s pollen onto the stigma of each of the blossoms on Victoria Sykes.

  That’s the extent of the actual cross-breeding, which is a human-controlled version of what the bees do. As spring continues, Victoria Sykes will bloom into flower and then set fruit. The flesh of the fruit on the tree is that of the Victoria Sykes variety, no different than what grew on that tree last year or the year before that. The seed surrounded by the flesh is the hybridized thing, and that’s what you care about if you’re the breeder. Once the fruit matures, you pick it and extract all the pits. You germinate the pits (which now represent the hybrid Jack Horner ×Victoria Sykes) and then hope for seedlings. Hybrids are stubborn, though, so many pits won’t sprout. Some will, and you plant those. Of those you plant, many won’t grow over the first year. Of those, only a small number will bud, and many that bud won’t set fruit the following year or the year after that. Of those that set fruit in the second and third years, many won’t have fruit that eats well or grows large enough or has enough color.

  Let’s say you haven’t yet given up all hope, so you decide there’s one particularly successful variety you want to evaluate some more. Your next step is to asexually propagate the variety—to clone it—by cutting off foot-long sticks from the tree’s branches. This is called budwood. You take the budwood from the seedling and you graft it onto fully grown, disease-resistant rootstock. To graft, you slice a flap into the bark of the rootstock, then insert a stick of budwood down inside the flap. You glue or tape the flap
closed. You do this several times on one rootstock, and then you repeat the process on however many other trees you want to have for evaluation. That budwood will grow into branches, and the next year, when these trees show fruit, the fruit that grows will be that hybrid offspring of Jack Horner and Victoria Sykes. You’ll continue to evaluate the fruit—at this point, you’ll assign it a code so that you can track your evaluations—and if it has some characteristics that make it an improvement over what you’ve been working with in your breeding program, maybe you’ll begin crossing with it, too. If it seems like something really special—something that’s got flavor, size, durability, something that’s farmer friendly—you may select it for the cream of the crop to show on the Wednesday fruit tours. If all has gone well to this point, you’re five to seven years out from when you made the original cross between Jack Horner and Victoria Sykes.

  Like so many Californians, Floyd Zaiger was born somewhere else: in Nebraska, in 1926. His German father and his Danish mother had moved there from Iowa after it had become clear that neither of their families would welcome having the other in it. The Dust Bowl forced the Zaigers to move back to Iowa the year after Floyd finished kindergarten. They fell in with his mother’s people, who ran big cattle and corn farms. The ragweed got so bad in Iowa that his mother’s eyesight and hearing started to fail. So for several years she would go for part of the year to Oregon to stay with Floyd’s father’s sister and her family. Floyd had two sisters and five brothers, and when their mother left for Oregon, they would all be farmed out to aunts and uncles. Once the ragweed had settled, his mother would return from out west and round them all up. Finally, on Floyd’s thirteenth birthday, his parents took the children to Oregon to stay. It was 1939, the year Hitler took Poland and Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. The Zaigers lived in Floyd’s aunt’s house, where there were already two families living. They farmed cauliflower and strawberries, and Floyd occasionally worked pulling onions, thousands of acres of which were grown in the area. He went to school in a one-room building where, because he was not the only Floyd in the classroom but the one whose last name was German, people started calling him Fritz. (That’s how he still signs the Christmas cards he and Betty send to friends.)