At first, pluots had seemed like an unambiguous blessing. With the reputation of plums at rock bottom, the California stone fruit industry now had a plum-like fruit that it could market as something new and different—or, at the very least, as something else. Not only could sales companies avoid the association with plums and work on negotiating a higher box price, they could also start to carve out more shelf space in the store for California stone fruit. In the mid-1990s, globalism was opening up American grocery stores to all kinds of new fresh produce. Claiming more real estate in the produce section was good for everybody in stone fruit.
There was one big problem, though, and the Dave Wilson Nursery’s Robert Woolley found out about it after the nursery applied for a PLU for the pluot. If growers and marketers were going to ask retailers to pay more for pluots, then retailers would have to have the means to charge more for them in the store. To do that, they needed a separate code.
PLU codes are managed by a trade organization called the Produce Marketing Association (PMA). When an application for a new PLU comes in to the PMA, it has to have three letters of support from retailers. Two committees review the application and, assuming everything checks out, move it up to another committee called the Produce Electronic Identification Board, which consists of growers, shippers, retailers, and distributors. The PEIB votes to approve, deny, or request more information for an application. The pluot application never made it to the PEIB, because “pluot” is a privately held trademark, and privately held trademarks are not eligible for PLU codes. Certain regional trademarks have received PLU codes—for example, Vidalia onions (#4159), Walla Walla onions (#4163), and Maui onions (#4164). But since the trademark for “pluot” is owned by the Zaigers, it’s comparable to something like the Ugli Fruit, a privately owned trademarked tangerine-pomelo hybrid which is known on its PLU sticker as the “Jamaican Tangelo” (#4459). Woolley scrambled to come up with another name. After consulting with growers, he submitted an application for “interspecific plum,” which would cover any fruit that was a cross between two or more different plum species. The application was approved and pluots had their PLU code: #3278. As long as that number and the words “interspecific plum” (or “I.S. plum”) were on the label somewhere, packers could brand the fruit however they wanted—Dinosaur Egg, Flavor Safari, what ever. The one thing they couldn’t call a pluot was a “plum,” but since the whole point was to distinguish pluots from plums, this suited the Jacksons and other early pluot growers just fine.
But as more and more growers planted pluots, the troubles started. Many retailers weren’t interested in making space for yet another new fruit (especially one that seemed so similar—at least on the surface—to an existing fruit). There were issues too with sending pluots overseas, where the labeling nuances were lost in translation. Because of these problems, some packers ignored #3278 and started slapping plum labels on pluots instead. The shipment of plums is governed by the CTFA (which is bound by state law to maintain the integrity of the “plum” as a commodity), so the only way to allow pluots to be shipped as plums was to get the state of California to acknowledge that pluots were plums. Had everyone in the industry agreed that getting the state to recognize pluots as plums was a good idea, then the problem would have been solved. But not every grower did agree that this was a good idea. If the point was to carve out more space for this new fruit in the produce section and to brand it as something far superior to the old, humdrum plums, then allowing its brand to be diminished by an association with the old, humdrum plums was in fact a very bad idea, the exact opposite of what the industry needed to do.
There was another compelling reason not to call pluots plums, and it had to do with money. Because pluots were “inter-specific plums” and “interspecific plums” were not included in the plum marketing order governed by the CTFA, then growers didn’t have to pay an assessment fee on interspecific plums like they did on plums. The assessment fee was only twenty cents or so a box, but pluot acreage was increasing every year, and everyone could do the math.
Sides began forming in the industry, none of them especially clear-cut. Some growers took the strict line that since pluots supposedly had apricot in them, they could not be considered plums. Others argued that if pluots looked like plums, tasted like plums, could be sprayed like plums, and had retailers who wanted to call them plums, then they should just be called plums: the “If it walks like a duck . . .” argument. Some pointed out that since other “interspecific plums”—Burbank’s Santa Rosa, for example, which was a hybrid of several different plum species—were included in the plum marketing order, then no exception could be made for pluots, especially since so many of them had so little apricot in them. Others insisted that it didn’t really matter what pluots’ genetic makeup was or what they walked like. The only thing that mattered was carving out the new niche in the marketplace. Still others were just constitutionally opposed to the CTFA and didn’t want to see a new variety sucked into the marketing order.
Soon, the name-calling started. Those in favor of calling them pluots were “just trying to avoid paying assessment fees.” Those who wanted to bring them into the marketing order and call them plums were “just trying to cash in on something that others had taken the risk on and established on their own.” There were threats of lawsuits. One grower played chicken with the CTFA by suggesting that if he was forced to call his pluots plums, he would sue the Zaigers and Dave Wilson on the premise that he had thought he’d been buying plum-apricot hybrids. In an open letter, another grower vowed to ship his pluots as plums. If state inspectors tried to stop him, he threatened to sue the California Department of Food and Agriculture to force it to prove that his pluots were in fact not plums.
The CTFA assembled the first Plumcot Task Force in January 1998. By April, it was the Inter Specific Stone Fruit Task Force. By July, it was the InterSpecific Plum Task Force. Later that year, there was a hearing on pluots at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. After listening to all sides, the state decided to remain undecided about what to do with pluots. Until the industry itself could come to some consensus about what pluots were, the state would stay out of it.
Over the next few years, the tension over pluots continued to rise until finally, in 2001, Blair Richardson was brought in to clean up the mess. Over the winter of 2002–2003, the group by then known as the Interspecific Task Force met several times and finally came to what was probably going to be as much of a consensus as it would ever come to. Growers and packers could continue marketing pluots as “pluots” and labeling them as “interspecific plums,” in which case they were on their own. They had no obligations to the CTFA for that fruit. (In fact, legally speaking, the CTFA could have nothing to do with that fruit.) Or, if a grower was willing to adhere to the CTFA’s plum standards and pay the assessment fee, he could sell his pluots as “plums.” In other words, pluots were whatever you needed them to be to make the sale.
There were still plenty of questions. Retailers reported that consumers were confused by the pluot vs. plum issue, and many buyers themselves weren’t really sure what was going on. One store would buy pluots as “pluots” or “interspecific plums” while another store would buy pluots as “plums,” and that just depended on different marketing strategies. The result was that you could go to two nearby stores and find the same variety sold as both a pluot and a plum, often for wildly different prices. Some of the intensity had been taken out of the issue within the industry. But out there in the supermarkets of summer, it was all muddled.
SUMMER
1
SATURDAY MORNING IN late July 2007. I was driving at dawn, stone fruit rush hour, in heavy traffic toward the Milton place in Parlier. The mountains ahead were in perfect resolution against the sky, their tops ringed in a yellow glow.
For a few weeks, I’d been hearing the same thing from every grower I talked to: After a promising start, peaches, plums, and nectarines were all in the tank. What baffled everyone was tha
t even in years when the fruit quality left something to be desired, at least one of the three fruits tended to sell well if the other two were down. This season, though, peaches, plums, and nectarines tasted better than they had in years—even better than in 2004—but the average box price for all three crept lower and lower. And it was worse than just a low box price. Even with the volume of fruit down and the eating quality excellent across the board, the stores weren’t running many sales, and fruit was stacking up in cold storage. Even with an industry-wide fire sale in effect, salesmen were having trouble moving the fruit. Not only was the catch-as-catch-can spot market down, but the program sales were hurting, too. Stores were buying less fruit and they were paying less for it. It was a bloodbath in the making.
Speculation about the cause of the slump covered all the bases. The spring weather had been good to all kinds of fruit—berries, melons, grapes—so there was a lot for buyers to choose from. Fuel prices were so high that both stores and consumers were cutting back on everything but necessities. Several big chains were in the middle of union negotiations, and every time a package of fruit came into the distribution center, it had to be divided for multiple stores and then rewrapped for shipment to the store level. The more fruit they ordered, the more they spent on labor. And then there was the most depressing reason people in the industry could think of: Maybe all those Summer Passionates didn’t like stone fruit as much as the marketers thought they did. Maybe people were just sick of plums.
Rod Milton’s truck wasn’t in the driveway at the house, so I dropped by and found him at the old packing shed next to his parents’ place. When he saw me pull in, he waved his panama hat, hopped up on a tractor, and pointed at his truck. “Just follow me,” he shouted. “I’m going down the avenue.”
I left the car at the shed and, in Rod’s truck, followed him down a narrow dirt road that led away from the street through the orchard. Behind the tractor, he was hauling white bins. We made a couple of turns and then Rod motioned for me to park the truck. He turned the tractor and disappeared between two rows of plum trees. I parked, got out, and wandered by myself in the opposite direction.
If you have no stake in it, there is no better place to be than an empty stone fruit orchard at dawn. The orderly trees stand close enough to form a cloister, but they’re not so tall and dense as to crowd you. They have an indelible quality to them, while the sagging fruit reminds you that time is running out. A muffled quiet, as if someone has turned down the volume on the world, makes the orchard seem more like a setting than a place—a courtyard fountain, rather than a waterfall in the woods.
But then when you see an orchard worked, you get just enough of a peek into the mechanics of it to put the reverie to bed. When I heard Rod kill the tractor’s engine behind me, I turned and walked back to find him. A crew of Latinos was working the trees, and I heard them whistling back and forth to each other, like a family of birds warning one another about a cat on the prowl. The pickers wore harnessed bags on their chests. Up in the tripod ladders that were a fixture in the Valley, they picked from the top down, working with both hands. The men were already soaked with sweat. There were murmurs in Spanish. When a picker’s bag was full, he climbed down, unhooked the flap at the bottom of the harness, and dumped the plums into one of the white bins behind the tractor. This bin packing was the standard in the industry and you could see why the fruit had to be picked at least a little green. Fully ripe fruit would be crushed.
Rod tossed me a plum—a Grand Rosa. “These are probably the last trees of it in the Valley.” Grand Rosa was an old Fred Anderson variety. He patented it a year or so after Floyd Zaiger had left to start his own operation. Anderson had planted a row of El Dorado plums, which were self-incompatible, next to a row of Santa Rosas (which, incidentally, were self-compatible). He’d taken open-pollinated seeds from the El Dorados and selected out seedlings that showed promise. One of them had become Grand Rosa. It was a nice-looking piece of fruit, purplish with yellow flesh, and even though it was a little crunchy for my taste, it was still a fine plum.
Rod was talking with a foreman about the schedule, which was continually re-calibrated through the thick of the season depending on what was happening with the fruit. If two varieties were coming off at the same time, or if one unexpectedly needed a few more days, then Rod had to shift around manpower. When he’d packed his own stuff, Rod had made all these decisions himself. Now that he was with Ballantine, he had to work with the packer on his picking schedule, and he occasionally grew frustrated by the back-and-forth that had to happen before stuff could get done. Today, this crew was going to finish out his Grand Rosas and then move over to his brother Rick’s orchard in the afternoon, where there was a lot of work to be done on a plot of nectarines. Rod and his foreman went over the schedule one more time and agreed to touch base in a little bit if anything changed. As we got back in the truck and drove toward town for breakfast, he shook his head, frustrated, and said, “I’m just not used to doing so much talking.”
He was frustrated as well by the way the season was turning out. The down market was the topic every Saturday morning when Rod met a crew of fruit people at a diner close to central Parlier. It was more kaffeeklatsch than breakfast. We were a little late, and when we arrived, half a dozen guys were already there, filling a couple of adjacent booths. Rod introduced me around and told the men that I was interested in the stone fruit business.
“Stone fruit welfare is more like it,” said one guy, who introduced himself as an in de pendent pest control adviser.
I asked them how many pluots they thought were out there in the market. One of them guessed that there were a quarter as many as there were plums. (Two to three million boxes of pluots, by his math.) Another estimated between four and six million boxes. Rod smiled and offered, “Two to eight million.”
“You know what’s interesting about the pluots is that their apricot nature sometimes comes out from a pest management point of view,” the pest adviser said. “Some of them don’t react to oil very well or to sulfur, which are two traits of apricots.”
That was interesting, I said, especially since some people think there’s no apricot in them at all.
“Yeah well, there’s apricot in some of them. I can promise you that. The main problem with the pluots, as some of these guys will tell you, is that they can have setting problems.”
“Flavorich, Flavorosa, Flavor Fall all have setting problems,” Rod said. “When Flavorosa came out, it was like the second coming. It was big. It tasted as good as, if not better than, a Friar, and it had a consistent flavor no matter if it was big or small. It set real well in Modesto, but then it didn’t set as well down here as it did up there. And then it cracked, too.”
“With those early pluots, a lot of people went in big and got smacked around,” said the pest adviser. “There’s a certain psychological component to it. You see other people getting in on it and you want to get in on it, too.”
I offered that I’d heard some people say that varieties should be completely vetted before they’re released to growers.
“That’s bullshit!” Rod said, then, softer, “Excuse me. But who’s to say what’s good for me in terms of varieties? What’s good for me is going to be different than what’s good for somebody else. I consider varietal selection the shear pin that determines who should be in this industry and who shouldn’t. If you get rid of that shear pin, then everybody can do it. If I pick good varieties, then I stay in business. That’s my edge.”
“That’s everything,” agreed the pest adviser. “That’s the whole thing. Every year, I’ve got guys I work with who say, ‘I can’t afford to plant new varieties.’ And I say, ‘No, you can’t afford not to.’ When you quit searching for new varieties, that’s when they write your epitaph.”
Later, as we were heading back toward Rod’s place, I asked him again about varietal selection. We had discussed it before and nothing else we’d talked about had elicited such a strong response. It wa
s always a risk to put in a new, experimental variety. Any number of things could go wrong with it. But if you saw something promising, it was a really good bet that plenty of others had seen it, too. And if that variety did take off, you wanted to be one of the first to have it. So there was a risk, as well, in not putting it in. “There’s risk involved either way,” Rod said, matter-of-factly. “But if you want someone to hold your hand and treat you like a baby, this just isn’t the business for you. If you want certainty, go get a job at PG&E. Get in the business or get out, but stop whining.”
And even though many of the interspecifics seemed more unstable, more unpredictable than established varieties, that was something that the grower had to be aware of going in. That had to be part of the grower’s calculus as he figured out which varieties to grow.
“Like with Flavorosa. I was one of the very first growers to put it in. I had ten acres in before I knew it, and that was a big risk for me. And it drops a lot. And we have to pick it six or seven times, which adds to the labor costs. But overall it’s been a big winner for me. Now, it’s time to graft it out and I think I’m going to put in Flavor Royale as a replacement. But that’s what’s right for me. Somebody else may want to hold on to it and for somebody else it may not work at all.”
He mentioned a newer Zaiger variety called Flavor Grenade. A smallish, oblong pluot with skin that mottles dull yellow to dull red, Flavor Grenade is a piece of fruit marketers describe as “unique” when what they mean is “ugly.” It is also very sweet, which is why retailers have been more forgiving about its size and appearance. Flavor Grenade comes off the tree around the same time Friar does, and side-by-side there’s no question which plum you’d rather eat. But since Rod already had a lot of Friars, and they were doing well in terms of sales, he couldn’t justify pulling out the Friars to put in the Flavor Grenade.
The Perfect Fruit Page 14