The Perfect Fruit Read online

  “When you have humans loading pallets, they drop one,” Daniel said. “But the machine always sets the fruit down in the most gentle way. Plus, the machine doesn’t complain, and it doesn’t get backaches.”

  Once a box was filled, it was moved to a holding area directly behind the packing line. The boxes were stacked onto pallets, and full pallets were tagged with a bar code and then picked up by forklifts which carried them into the pre-cooling room. Here, neighboring rows of pallets were covered in a tarp in order to force cold air into the boxes and cool the fruit down to 33 to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. This near-freezing temperature stopped the ripening process, so that the fruit would firm up and last longer for the coming journey to whichever distant point it was bound. This usually took five to six hours, though it could take longer if the fruit was especially warm. Once the fruit was cooled down to just above freezing, the pallets were either loaded onto trucks or moved into cold storage to await shipment. It was standard practice in just about every packing shed to operate on a “first in, first out” basis. The forklifts were equipped with scanners, so they could easily run through the bar codes to find the load that had been in cold storage the longest. If all went well during the harvest season, a packer’s cold storage area wouldn’t get so full that he had to worry about losing pallets in the system, but there were some years—2004, for example—when a lot of the fruit that went into cold storage never made it onto a truck. It sat and sat and sat until the fruit was good for nothing.

  As we were leaving the packing shed, I noticed a dozen or so flattened boxes stuck to the wall above the second packing line. Each box had a different label, among them Flavor Safari (Family Tree’s premium label for pluots) and Great White (a shark-festooned label for their white-fleshed peaches and nectarines). These were Family Tree’s most common labels, though they used more, depending on what the buyer wanted and where the fruit was going. And in just over a decade, they had gone from two box styles to several dozen.

  The boxes were stored in one corner of the shed, where they were assembled as needed and then hooked onto a conveyor that ran above the packing line and then curved back behind the packing stations. Each packing station had a little screen on which the packer could see the variety she was packing. (All the packers are women and all the palletizers are men.) She could then turn around and find the box right there on the conveyor.

  Keeping up with all the different box styles and having to slow down and stop the line to make adjustments was inefficient, but ultimately it made sense given that Family Tree had positioned itself as a high-end specialty supplier. “We’re doing fruit where we’ve got to keep the bloom on,” Daniel said, “so we can’t go super-slamming things into walls at full speed. It might cost us ten cents a box more to do all this, but if it means that we get paid two more dollars a box, then that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? To be quite honest, these boxes are what’s kept us in the ball game.”

  For others, it’s what drove them out. Or, in Rod Milton’s case, almost drove him out. This time of year was when he used to dust off his own packing line. It was a modest line, a line that a few people could handle—a far cry from the hangar at Family Tree. He usually had to spend a few weeks doing a tune-up, tightening screws and replacing belts, but it had been worthwhile because it had given him more control over what he packed and how he packed it.

  Then came the bloodbath of 2004. After looking over his costs, Rod had decided that the only way he could stay in the deal would be to hook up with a commercial packer.

  The main factor in his decision was the great proliferation of box styles. While having dozens of different box styles did make larger growers like Family Tree less efficient, they were generally able to absorb the extra costs because of their size. For a grower of Rod’s size, though, having to stop the packing line to change to a different box was brutal for his labor costs. Even worse, he had to order and store all these different boxes just in case he needed them, and often, he’d just end up with a big stack of obsolete boxes.

  “You end up giving all the money to the box company,” he said when I went to see him after touring Family Tree’s shed. Though the box issue had been a problem for the past ten to fifteen years, Rod had tried to manage the problem as well as possible. But in the aftermath of 2004, he had realized that he was never going to be able to keep up with all the different pack styles that buyers were now demanding. It would cost him too much time and too much money to do so—time and money he didn’t have.

  Given the proximity of Ballantine and the fact that his brother, Rick, was its head of grower services, David Albertson’s company was a natural fit for Rod. His first two seasons with Ballantine had gone well enough. He’d had to make some slight changes to the way he did things. For example, when he’d done his own packing, he’d grown several of his plums for the export market, which was more tolerant of (and in some cases actually preferred) smaller fruit. For those plums, he was usually able to get them all in two picks: The first pick cleaned out the top and sides of the tree while the second one took care of the inside fruit. Ballantine, however, planned on shipping more of Rod’s fruit to markets in the United States, where consumers preferred larger fruit. This meant that Rod now needed to do three or four picks of those varieties instead of two. More picks meant higher labor costs.

  The other issue was psychological. After decades of pretty much calling his own shots, Rod was now having to coordinate with other people. He wasn’t constitutionally opposed to that; he just wasn’t used to all the talk. Given all that, Rod was still happy with the arrangement. He’d had two good years of sales with Ballantine. Plus, not having to pack his own stuff gave him more time to focus on being a good grower.

  In stone fruit, what happens during the summer is mostly because of what happened during the winter and spring, and many things happened in the first several months of 2007 that would be important during the growing season to come. On New Year’s Day, the minimum wage had gone up fifty cents in California. Growers would be paying more for labor, assuming they could get it. With the Mexican border tightening and the immigration bill stalled in Congress, many growers feared that field workers would be hard to come by in the first place. ( Just several months earlier, California pear growers had lost millions of dollars in fruit that had gone unharvested because there was no one to pick it.)

  In the first six weeks of the year, there hadn’t been much snow in the Sierras, leaving many to suspect that water would be an issue in some places, as it had been for several years. Every fruit grower I met seemed to know how many new homes had been built in the past couple of years (nearly one hundred and fifty thousand in Fresno County alone), how much water they sucked up (water for five houses would irrigate four acres of fruit), and where the homeowners’ priorities would be when the water dried up (flush toilet vs. eat plums).

  Because of the January freeze, the bloom in February was off the charts. The white plum blossoms and pink and red peach and nectarine blossoms were growing on top of each other, almost like double flowers. “Generally when you see that, you don’t get a lot of nectar in the flower,” Rod said. “I think there’s just not a lot of vitality in the flowers and so the bees aren’t working them as hard.”

  There was also the shortage of bees to worry about. Whole colonies were dying off, and no one really knew why. It had led to a scramble among fruit growers, who were competing with other farmers across the West for hives, especially California almond growers. Almond trees need lots of bees for pollination, and as more and more growers were moving from fruits to nuts, bees were already in high demand. With fewer bees than normal (and with less active bees), pollination would be light. When pollination was light, fruit that needed another variety to pollenize it generally wouldn’t set as well. Since most plums did need a pollenizer, Rod anticipated that the plum set would be light. (To help with this, he’d been out doing some bloom-time pruning to shake the trees and help the pollen fall out.) A light set across the board
was often a good thing, because it meant a lower volume of fruit would hit the market later in the summer, keeping prices higher. Of course, it all depended on the set of your trees, Rod emphasized. “Everyone wants to have a heavy set on his fruit but a light set on everybody else’s. Last year, we were very short as an industry, but it was a really good year for me.”

  To illustrate how generally bad conditions could work in one person’s favor, he showed me a framed bill of sale dated June 15, 1995. It was a receipt for 958 boxes of Blackamber plums, which Rod had picked on June 13 and 14. On June 15, at three o’clock in the afternoon, as his Blackambers were on the way to the harbor in San Pedro, a hail storm had hit the southern San Joaquin and destroyed much of the Valley’s remaining plum crop. Rod’s Blackambers had been some of the only Blackambers left in California, and the salesman he was working with had been able to get five times the normal domestic box price from a buyer in Taiwan. In that one sale, Rod had made half of what he might have made in a normal year.

  The epilogue to the story is even more interesting. Usually export sales were kind of “send the fruit and hope for the best” deals, with the sales company paying freight and taking responsibility for the fruit until it arrived in Taiwan. The salesman would nail down a price per box, get it on the boat, and then renegotiate once the fruit arrived at its destination. But since so many Blackambers had been destroyed by hail, the Asian buyer had wanted to lock down the price and guarantee the sale, so he had assumed the freight costs and signed off before the fruit was loaded onto the boat for Taiwan. Good thing, too: one day into the trip across the Pacific, the compressor had broken down. By the time the fruit had arrived in Taiwan, it was rotten.

  Broken compressors were always possible, but hail was more likely. Having been burned too many times by it, the big growers had installed hail cannons that shot bursts of air into the sky to try to disrupt any clouds looming over their orchards. The cannons were going off all spring.

  3

  ROD HAD INVITED me to tag along to the California Tree Fruit Agreement’s first educational symposium, which was held on a Wednesday in late February at the downtown Fresno convention center. I signed in at the registration table and shuffled around, looking for a familiar face. Just about everyone who was anyone in California stone fruit was here at the symposium or had sent a proxy. As a rule, you could look at the shoes (muddy vs. shiny) and shirts (button-down vs. point collar) to distinguish the growers from the marketers and the CTFA staff. There were lots of cell phones clipped to belt loops, and very few women. I spotted Rod just as everyone was filing into a windowless conference room for the morning session. We sat in the back row, next to the field manager at David Jackson’s Family Tree Farms.

  The first speaker was Louis Ng, the CTFA’s representative in China. In 2006, a new trade agreement allowed growers in the San Joaquin to ship plums to mainland China for the first time. (In turn, growers from certain regions of China could ship their pears to the United States.) Traditionally, Asian-bound California plums were shipped to Taiwan and made it onto the mainland from there. The direct relationship with China was a huge opening for plum growers. “There’s been an eight percent increase in fresh fruit consumption in China, and the [fruit-growing] industry there is not really mature. There’s no infrastructure,” Ng said to the rapt crowd. “It holds a lot of promise for you.” Lots of nods in the audience.

  But, Ng said quietly, there was a small window of opportunity. American plums were generally much more expensive than Chinese plums, he said. There were certain areas—Shanghai, for example—where they could market California plums, but in general they were still a luxury good. Growers in China, meanwhile, were planting a lot of the same varieties as California had and were already exporting to Hong Kong, Japan, Pakistan, and other places. “Once the logistics system improves, China could be a major competitor to you, a real threat.” There was shuffling and coughing around me. Then, Ng ended on a glass-half-full note. The window was small, but there was time, ten years maybe, during which California could carve out a section of the market, even as the Chinese plum industry grew.

  Next up was Paul Stuart, a “senior produce category merchant” from Wegman’s, a mid-size upscale chain with stores in the mid-Atlantic and New England. It was a dream store for fruit growers. In an era when most stores’ produce section employees couldn’t tell the difference between a Fuji and a Granny Smith, Stuart was urging stone fruit to go the way of the apple and try to market more varieties by name. People in the audience, who were used to the black and red plum ghettos, traded looks: What did he say? (Many Wegman’s locations keep refractometers in the store so produce managers can show customers the Brix levels of various fruits.) Stuart said that one of the chain’s cofounders, Danny Wegman, was fond of saying that the peach was the “single most difficult product to get right” in the store.

  Stuart was trying to play a short video about the opening of a new Wegman’s branch, but the sound wasn’t working. As we watched absurdly enthusiastic people mouth silently at the camera, several growers around me took advantage of the lull and got in a quick nap. When the video’s sound came on, someone was blurting, “I am so excited! I am never cooking dinner again!” Stuart started the video over. It was surprisingly good. The store’s produce section looked spacious and grand, the fruit stacked in neat towers. I found myself thinking: If I were a plum grower, that’s where I’d want my fruit to end up.

  After the video, Stuart whipped through a brief powerpoint presentation, covering recent sales figures, the importance of food safety, and the rise of organics. One of the last slides read:

  What will drive sales?

  Taste-Taste-Taste

  Stuart looked out at the assembled crowd and said simply, “We’ve got to have the best varieties out there and they have to be picked at the best times. We need hand-picked, ripe fruit. We need more flavor! We cannot offer the perfect fruit if you don’t set the table for us.” There was big applause. That hardly sounded like “big, red, hard.”

  At lunch, I sat between Rod and a fruit-growing neighbor of his; their families went way back. “In the day, my family traded his family a pony for a cocker spaniel,” Rod said. “Or maybe it was the other way around.” The keynote speaker at lunch was supposed to be California’s Secretary of Agriculture, A. G. Kawamura, but he had had to cancel at the last minute, so one of his deputies had come. Over steak with scalloped potatoes, green beans, and carrots, we watched his slide show about the various diseases and pests that could wreck California agriculture—seemingly at any minute. The Asian Longhorn Beetle. The Oriental Fruit Fly. Citrus canker. Then dessert.

  I went to a couple of panels after lunch and then sat in on a presentation by the CTFA’s marketing people. For the past few years, the industry had been working with an outside consumer research consultant named John Lundeen. He had worked with, among others, the California Strawberry Commission, the American Lamb Council, and the Almond Board of California. He was about to start a new job as the executive director of market research for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. This was his CTFA swan song.

  Lundeen started by talking about the work he’d done with the almond industry in the mid-1990s. During the first focus groups he had conducted about almonds, he kept hearing people say that they made you fat, were bad for your heart, and increased your cholesterol. In response, the almond industry had underwritten some nutritional studies. One thing they had discovered was that almonds were high in vitamin E, an antioxidant that was perceived as being good for your heart. From that small starting point, they had begun to talk to nutritionists about almonds and eventually, the message had morphed from “almonds are bad for you” to “you can have some almonds every day and get good cholesterol” to “eat an ounce to an ounce and a half of almonds a day.”

  At the same time, they had been conducting consumer research to figure out who the target audience for almonds was. In the mid-1990s, few Americans were just snacking on almo
nds. Most of the almonds we ate in the United States were in other things—primarily candy bars, cereals, and ice creams—and so the industry’s marketing had been pushing the message that “almonds made other food better.” Gradually, though, Lundeen had started to see focus groups populated with women who carried “little bags of almonds in their purses. They were starting to take almonds on the road with them. They were starting to pack almonds in their husbands’ lunches, because their husbands had cholesterol problems. So there was this shift. Almonds didn’t just make food better. They made life better.”

  Though the challenges facing stone fruit weren’t the same ones that almonds had faced, a similar sequence had been set in motion for peaches, plums, and nectarines. First, the nutritional angle: Lundeen mentioned recent research that has shown plums—specifically red-fleshed plums—to have some really powerful antioxidant qualities. “So you’re starting to get a little bit of a story here. It’s a story that you can start to approach the dietician with, the food writer with.” (When you start reading plum-as-antioxidant stories in the food section of your local paper, remember Lundeen.)

  Then came the consumer research, for which Lundeen and his team had followed consumers through the grocery store while they were shopping. Here’s what they found about your relationship with plums: If you are that earnest blank known as Average Consumer, then you think of plums as “a little more adult, a little more gourmet” than peaches or nectarines. You prefer them as a midafternoon snack, something to tide you over until dinner. You like a plum that fits in the palm of your hand, somewhere between the size of a cue ball and a baseball. Anything larger than a baseball and you start to worry about waste. Anything racquetball-size or smaller, and the pit-to-fruit ratio seems too high. While you’re comfortable with pretty much any dark plum—red, black, or purple—a green plum tends to confuse you because you’re not sure how to tell when they’re ripe.