Back away from the can opener...
Prime Future 178: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy
“Two recipes diverged in a kitchen, and I— I took the one that did not require a can opener. And that has made all the difference.” - Robert Frost, probably
It's Thanksgiving week in the US, so it's game time for the canned vs. fresh cranberry sauce decision. Not to get overly political right out of the gate, but I am a Fresh Cranberry Sauce purist.
But that's not the most interesting divergent path that Thanksgiving points to.
A fascinating article in The Journal highlighted some backstory on Ocean Spray, the almost 100-year-old cranberry co-op, that was interesting for a few reasons we’ll get to in a minute.
First, the co-op was formed because of a clever idea from a cranberry grower:
"The cooperative was started in 1930 by “three maverick farmers,” as Ocean Spray calls its founders. One of those entrepreneurs was Marcus Urann, a lawyer who purchased a bog in Massachusetts and went looking for ways to preserve cranberries and sell them year-round. His experiments led him to come up with something: He invented cranberry sauce in a can. The market for canned products soon became so large, and the competition in the cranberry industry so fierce, that Urann came up with something else, banding together with two farmers to establish Ocean Spray."
Then, the business lived through an existential crisis that became a hyper-motivator to find new ways to expand the cranberry category:
"The most terrifying existential threat to their business model was an event known as the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959, when the federal government sparked a nationwide panic in the weeks right before Thanksgiving. The authorities issued a warning about cranberries with trace amounts of a herbicide linked with cancer in lab rats. Americans went bananas. There was such a freakout that the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported fresh cranberry sales for that year as a big, fat zero.
It was the worst thing that could have happened to Ocean Spray. It also turned out to be exactly what Ocean Spray needed to survive. The farmers suddenly recognized that selling canned sauce for one holiday wasn’t a sustainable business. To slash the risk of another, scarier cranberry debacle, they would have to develop new products. In the 1960s, Ocean Spray released its first blended juice. In the 1980s, Ocean Spray pioneered juice boxes. In the 1990s, Ocean Spray introduced dried, sweetened cranberries and a catchy name for them: Craisins."
But it isn't clear where the next big wave of growth will come from:
“We have spent many millions of dollars on innovation, but there’s a limit to what you can do,” he (a board member) said. “They haven’t found another innovative way to utilize cranberries.” It’s not for a lack of trying.
Ocean Spray sells cranberry juices blended with every type of fruit you can imagine—and some that you might not have known existed, like the limited-edition Cran x Dragon Fruit. “Consumers are telling us they want that flavor exploration,” Hayes said. The company’s executives recently unveiled a zero-sugar juice line, partnered with Hershey on chocolate-dipped cranberry bites and struck a deal with Absolut for ready-to-drink cans of vodka cranberry. They’re especially psyched about the opportunity for healthy fruits in the ongoing snack-ification of the American diet. It’s all part of their efforts to give the cranberry a glowup.”
(Although, what if the next wave of growth is more about consumer trends moving in their favor rather than a new cranberry innovation? How much does Ocean Spray benefit from an Ozempic world if more people turn to things like dried fruit for snacks instead of processed food?)
Anybody who ever had to complete a group project in school can see why a co-op structure can be a minefield. But the article got me thinking about a few hypotheses on why Ocean Spray has succeeded, which led me to questions about what does/doesn’t translate to meat and dairy. Let’s get to it.
The rest of this edition is available only to premium subscribers. Shoutout to the many premium subscribers making the most of Prime Future as they create the future of livestock, meat, & dairy.