When the Pilgrims first landed, they found the Nauset Indians using a bright red waxy berry that seemed good to eat as well as valuable for making poul tices and preserving game. The Indians called the berry sassamanesh; the Pilgrims rechristened it the cranberry. At first confined to New England, and mainly to Cape Cod, as a diet staple and profitable source of income, the cranberry gradually conquered the holiday tables of the nation. This month, when Americans buy more cranberries than at any other time of the year, no Thanksgiving dinner will be considered complete without them. The most important fact about the $54 million cran berry industry, however, is that its health no longer depends on just the traditional holiday trade; cranberry products have grown into year-round sellers that compete with other foods for everyday use.
Behind this transformation is Ocean Spray of Hanson, Mass., which produces 85% of all the cranberries grown in the world, has annual sales of $46 million. Ocean Spray is a cooperative that distributes its earnings to a pool of 1,000 growers in Massachusetts (where the sandy-bottomed bogs of Cape Cod prove most hospitable to the berry), New Jersey, Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington State. Formed by a series of mergers in 1930, it has taken much of the risk and uncertainty out of cranberry growing, this fall paid growers $13.99 a barrel for the 1.2 million barrels that their bogs produced; at one time, the price was as low as $3 a barrel.
Bogged Down. Ocean Spray grew bigger than any other cranberry cooperative because Founder Marcus Urann, figuring that housewives were tired of stewing fresh cranberries, decided to can some cranberry sauce. Housewives ate it up. Even so, cranberries sold mostly around holidays, and sales grew no faster than the population. The industry suffered its greatest setback in 1959, when the Government seized a few cranberries sprayed with aminotriazole weed killer and announced that cranberries so contaminated might cause cancer. That Thanksgiving and Christmas, and in the months that followed, the public reluctance to buy cranberries almost ruined the industry.
After that debacle, cranberry growers decided that they needed a broader base for their industry, began to push the berries as a year-round dish. Two years ago they hired as Ocean Spray's general manager Edward Gelsthorpe, a sharp product executive with Colgate-Palmolive and a summertime sailor who was attracted by the idea of living year-round on Cape Cod. Gelsthorpe was also attracted by Ocean Spray's possibilities. "It took only superficial analysis," he says, "to realize how little had been done with cranberries."