One of their first introductions was variety 35EA376, a fifty-fifty plumcot they patented as Flavorella. They’d selected it from an open-pollinated cross of an unknown apricot and a plum called Red Beaut, which Fred Anderson had patented in the mid-1960s. (Anderson had selected Red Beaut from a cross he’d made between an old variety called El Dorado and another called Burmosa, which at that time was one of the earliest-ripening plums in California. When Red Beaut was released in 1965, El Dorado and Burmosa made up nearly 15 percent of the California plum crop. Ten years later, there were as many Red Beauts shipped out of California as there were El Dorados and Burmosas combined. By 1988, Red Beaut was one of the most widely grown plums in the state, while El Dorado and Burmosa were pretty much relics.) Flavorella has, in the language of plant patents, “scant down,” meaning a soft, short apricot-like fuzz that’s almost undetectable. Depending on the year, Flavorella’s skin is greenish-yellow to rich, butternut orange. It’s on the smaller side and it’s juicy but not dripping, its flesh more apricot than plum. It’s not an outstanding piece of fruit by today’s standards—the average Brix listed in the patent was only 14.6—but when ripe the smell will make you loopy.
It is common for growers to test new varieties for breeders. In exchange for providing information to the breeder about how the variety performs, the grower gets a small number of trees to plant in his orchard. The breeder gets a sense of how the variety will perform in certain climates and soil conditions, while the grower will have a jump on the variety if it looks like a winner. After some testing of Flavorella, growers reported one major problem with the variety: To get any flavor out of the fruit, you had to wait until it was ripe; but if you let it sit on the tree even one day too long, it dropped. A lot of people loved the novelty of Flavorella, but the picking of it was almost prohibitive. One grower who tested it told Floyd that he would lie awake at night and just hear it go plop, plop, plop. Some growers went to the extreme of spreading a straw-covered canvas net under the trees to soften the fall. But that wasn’t something you could do for quantity on a commercial scale.
Because of the drop problem, Flavorella fizzled. But the Zaigers were just getting started with the interspecifics. In the late 1980s, they patented three plum-apricot hybrids that were at least a generation beyond Flavorella. The Zaigers had selected two of the varieties from backcrosses they made between a first-generation plumcot and a plum. As with Flavorella, the plumcot in both cases was a selection taken from an open-pollinated Red Beaut seedling. (The plum they used for the backcross was Mariposa, an older variety that was known in some circles as “Improved Satsuma” because it was thought to be the open-pollinated offspring of Burbank’s original “Blood Plum.”) The Zaigers named these first two varieties Flavor Supreme and Flavor Queen, and they averaged 17 and 18 Brix, respectively. The third variety also averaged 18 Brix. It was called Flavor King. It was the result of one plum-apricot hybrid being crossed with another plum-apricot hybrid—plumcot X plumcot. (A decade later at Chez Panisse, it was Flavor King that would be served alone as the finale of a sixty-five-dollar prix fixe menu.)
The Zaigers had patented the three varieties because the Dave Wilson Nursery wanted to sell them in its new home garden division. But in order to sell them, they needed a name. Even though the hybrids were mostly plum, they couldn’t really call them “plums” because the varieties had apricot genes in their family trees. But they couldn’t call them “plumcots” either, because for decades that name had been used only for first-generation plum-apricot crosses like Flavorella. Locked out of the existing taxonomy, the Zaigers decided to trademark their own name. In their 1989 application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, they dropped the two middle consonants of the word that was closest to what they had and just decided to call the things “pluots.”
The grower who had lain awake at night listening to Flavorella drop was Mike Jackson. The oldest son of David Jackson’s older brother George, and one of the heads of the Kingsburg Orchards empire, Mike was undeterred by his experience. He wanted to try these pluots. Never mind that they were meant for the home garden market, and not commercial growers. Never mind that Flavor Supreme looked like a warped and dulled six ball or that Flavor King had a bad problem with cracking. The Jacksons had decided to “chase flavor.” Before they worried about a variety being farmer-friendly, they wanted it to taste good. That was their niche, and pluots fit in it nicely.
Around the time of the plum industry’s self-destruction, Mike bought a ranch from a local grower named Wayne Adams. Like the Jacksons, Adams had been testing some of the Zaigers’ varieties. One of the unpatented pluots that Adams had been testing was a light red fruit mottled with gray-green streaks and dotted with pale sugar spots. It was big for a plum and heavy for its size, squat and round-cheeked. Just inside the skin, the flesh had a filament of bright red, fading to a pinkish-white. The fruit’s average 17.4 Brix was a lot of sugar for that time, and it hit the mouth as a flat, candy-simple sweet—not complex but not at all tart.
Mike hadn’t seen this numbered variety before, but after spending a little time with it, he liked what he saw. It appeared to set well and had as its pollenizer Flavor Queen, the sweet, yellowish pluot the Jacksons were already testing. The variety had few cosmetic problems—aside from its inherent mottledness—and seemed to hold up well to shipping. Adams had been one of the first to test the variety, and it still hadn’t been seen by that many growers, many of whom had plum-fatigue anyway. Seeing an opportunity, the Jacksons placed a big order with the Dave Wilson Nursery.
In their patent application, the Zaigers called the variety Dapple Dandy. They wrote that it was “a cross between a plum selection with the identification No. 58GA338 and a plumcot selection of unknown parentage. The plum selection with the identification No. 58GA338 originated from a cross between Laroda Plum (non-patented) and Queen Ann Plum (non-patented). A large group of seedlings were planted and grown under careful observation by us and one such seedling which represents the present variety, being especially desirable for its fruit quality was selected for asexual reproduction and commercialization.”
Wayne Adams had mentioned that Dapple Dandy kind of looked like a “dinosaur egg.” ( Jurassic Park had recently become the most successful movie of all time.) The Jacksons thought so, too, and they trademarked the name. When they had their first sizable harvest in the mid-1990s, they picked the fruit as ripe as possible and sent Dapple Dandy to grocery stores with a special label: On each piece of fruit they placed an oval sticker with a picture of a smiling apatosaurus and the name “Dinosaur Egg.” The sweet, mottled fruit was a hit.
After Dinosaur Egg had been out in the market for a couple of years, what was amazing to those paying attention was that many of the retailers who did business with the Jacksons were actually carving out a separate space for the fruit. Long accustomed to retailers lumping all plums into the “black” bin and the “red” bin, they were even more amazed when the stores started using the Jacksons’ brand name on in-store signs. The stores were selling Dinosaur Eggs—not plums, not pluots, not Dapple Dandies. Most amazing of all was that by the late 1990s, when many plum varieties were spoiling in the store at a dollar or so a pound, Dinosaur Eggs were regularly selling out at nearly four times the price.
The success did not go unnoticed. In July 1998, Good Fruit Grower magazine ran an article entitled “New Fruit Hybrids Are Moving into Mainstream.” In it, Robert Woolley, the head of the Dave Wilson Nursery, estimated that more than two thousand acres of pluots had been planted since 1994. “It’s astonishing how it’s taking off,” Woolley was quoted in the article. “I’ve been told that we’re at a point where the nectarine industry was forty years ago.”
Pluots had arrived.
6
IN EARLY APRIL 2007, the CTFA sent out a press release called “PPN: A Great Start.” It read:
The California peach, plum, and nectarine industry is expecting an excellent 2007 crop.
“W
e’ve had a great start to the growing season,” said CTFA President Sheri Mierau. “Favorable winter and spring weather have created ideal conditions for peach, plum, and nectarine development to this point.”
A cool winter delivered more than 1,000 chilling hours, meaning peach, plum, and nectarine trees were well rested coming into the spring bloom season. The ample chill hours resulted in a strong, uniform bloom, which led into a beautiful warm, dry spring. The warm, dry spring weather is conducive to the development of fruit with high sugars and a great-tasting eating experience.
The warm, dry spring of 2007 resembles that of the spring of 2004, a year that delivered what was widely agreed to be the best-tasting California peach, plum, and nectarine crop in ten years. The industry believes it is on track for comparable fruit quality this season . . .
A superstitious grower might have been troubled by the comparison to 2004. That year did deliver “what was widely agreed to be the best-tasting California peach, plum, and nectarine crop in ten years,” but it was also the year that was widely agreed to have been, as Ballantine’s Rick Milton had put it, a “bloodbath.”
But then, around Easter, something auspicious happened: One of the worst freezes on record hit the southeastern United States. All the southern trees were fruiting by that time, and most of the crop was lost. It was devastating for southern growers but it did bode well for the guys in California who wouldn’t have to compete with the South’s fruit—notably its peaches—during the first part of the season. This was important not just because box prices were often high at the beginning of the season, but also because those weeks before Memorial Day were crucial in setting the tone for the rest of the summer. If California growers could deliver great-tasting fruit right from the get-go, then supermarkets might see early repeat sales and the marketers could ride the momentum and start moving a lot of fruit.
When I checked in with Rod Milton, he was optimistically cautious. His major concern—of the ones he knew about—was the size of the fruit. Because of the strong bloom and the warm, dry spring, the early varieties were maturing faster than normal and might not have enough time for the fruit to develop to the right size up and down the tree. Size was usually something the stores wouldn’t budge on, but if the early fruit was eating well, he could live with it being a little small, especially since California growers wouldn’t be competing with fruit from the South.
What really gnawed at Rod were the unknowables.
“Seasons always surprise you,” he said. “By this point, there’s a certain amount of predictability, but every season there’s always something that surprises you.”
By mid-May, however, when Rod began picking pluots, the outlook was still good. While the first fruit that came off the tree felt closer in size to a racquetball than a cue ball, its flavor was off the charts. The initial reports from Ballantine seemed promising. Fruit was moving out the door.
It was moving, too, at Family Tree Farms, and across the street the golf course at Ridge Creek was taking shape as machines smoothed over mounds of dirt—future fairways—and a bridge in the foreground connected two roads that looped away from the main road and out of sight.
David Jackson’s sales team was prioritizing “program sales” that hadn’t yet kicked in. “Program sales” described a relatively new way of thinking about fruit sales that was more in line with how supermarkets were now doing business. In the days before mass consolidation on the retail side, when there had been a great sea of potential buyers, selling fruit had been all about the spot market, selling that par ticu lar day’s fruit. Salesmen would get to the office at four or five o’clock in the morning and stay until six or seven at night. They were always working the phones, making sales, thriving on the juice. It was intense and exhilarating, and the job had a high burnout rate.
Today, with so few buyers and with the volume game fading, that way of business just didn’t make sense anymore for operations like Family Tree. Buyers were looking for a consistent, steady supply of fruit, and so Family Tree and other sales companies tried to make it as easy as possible on buyers to get that fruit from one place. Setting up programs meant that Family Tree looked at what and how much fruit they planned to have over the coming season and when they planned to have it, and then they methodically tried to attach a buyer beforehand to as much of the fruit as possible.
Program sales usually didn’t start until after Memorial Day. The hope was that the early-season stuff would move briskly enough so that the program sales could kick in at the beginning and run the course of the season. Of course, working the fruit into a program didn’t guarantee that it would sell. Buyers were always looking around for deals, and stone fruit was, as several people noted, a “sell it or smell it” commodity. If a buyer was lagging and you had fruit stacking up in cold storage, you couldn’t make the sale happen by hoping for it. Being able to get a good read on a buyer was still an old-school skill worth having. You had to know when to let go of the fruit while it was still worth something to somebody.
7
AS THE SEASON got under way, the stone fruit consolidation that Ballantine’s David Albertson had talked about over Armenian-Cajun food began to take shape behind the scenes. A former head of the CTFA named Blair Richardson announced that he was heading up a company called Fresh-Sense, a federation of the sales and marketing divisions of half a dozen major packer-shippers, including Ballantine.
The companies involved in FreshSense accounted for about one third of all the stone fruit shipped out of California. They had already been working together in a loosely bound cooperative called Ripe ’n Ready which was based on the post-harvest “conditioning” program that called for cooling the fruit when it came in from the hot orchard. The goal of the Ripe ’n Ready alliance was to share knowledge and cooperate on a common business strategy. The alliance was too loose, though. None of the partners wanted to be the first to make a commitment, and so few commitments were made. FreshSense was the group’s second try, and this time they vowed to work together, though they were still working out the logistics of the new organization, which wouldn’t be active as a sales company until 2008 at best. The idea, though, was to consolidate the sales and marketing efforts of the different companies under one roof. If they could successfully control the box price for all the fruit they produced, then they could stabilize a much greater share of the industry.
The point of FreshSense, however, wasn’t just to stabilize the price, Blair said one morning when we met for breakfast at the Blossom Trail Cafe, in Sanger. He was wearing a pressed blue button-down and drinking tea. The company also wanted to reach into the supply chain and be more involved with the fruit at the store level. “There’s not a farmer out there who’s going to rely on someone to harvest his fruit for him. So what are we doing letting someone have full control over the marketing of that fruit?” He mentioned the consumer packaged goods companies, which had some say in where and how their product was marketed in the store. Fruit growers put the fruit in a box at the packing house, loaded it onto a truck, and then it was gone.
“We have to become better partners for the retailers and start combining our resources,” Blair said. The alternative was bleak. “We aren’t all going to be able to survive individually,” he continued. “There was the mass consolidation at the retail level in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and there hasn’t been a strong enough reaction in the industry to confront that. You have to have an opposite and equal reaction to survive.”
Blair was spending his first months on the job negotiating with the FreshSense packers, trying to figure out exactly how the company would be structured. The members had been each other’s competitors for a long time, and, having failed to come together in any meaningful way in the Ripe ’n Ready deal, they were now talking about the best way to exist as partners. As Albertson said when I asked him about the group, they “were trying to figure out how to agree to what they had all agreed to. We don’t want to be all black and white. We want to be all gray. But
your gray may be light gray, and my gray may be dark gray. They’re all gray but they’re not the same gray.”
It was Blair’s job right now to get them all seeing the same shade of gray. It was not going to be easy, but his recent experience at the CTFA had been instructive. Blair had come to the CTFA with no experience in stone fruit. After attending Texas A&M on an ag scholarship, he had worked for a decade at a cotton cooperative based in Bakersfield. In the late 1990s, he and his family had moved to Sacramento, and he had commuted into San Francisco to work at a startup involved in online ag commodities trading. When the CTFA’s long-time president had retired in 2001, the search committee had looked high and low for a replacement.
“Despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that I had no industry experience, they thought I might be right for the job,” Blair said.
When he was hired at the CTFA in 2002, there were four outstanding grower lawsuits against the CTFA’s Plum Marketing Board. (Three of those were settled during his tenure.) Maybe even more insidious than the direct animosity toward the CTFA was the industry’s overwhelming indifference toward it. This was evident after the peach and nectarine referendum that took place during Blair’s first months on the job. In the vote to decide whether they would continue participating in the marketing order, just over 10 percent of peach and nectarine growers even bothered to cast a vote.
Blair had undergone several rounds of interviews with CTFA members and staff, so he was aware of all these issues when he accepted the job. There was one big issue that he was not aware of, though, and it could be summed up in a word. The reason he was not aware of it was because no one had uttered that word during any of his interviews. And since he didn’t even know the word existed, he couldn’t have been expected to ask about it. The word was “pluot.”
The Perfect Fruit Page 13