Unlike the Zaigers, Glen Bradford did all his crossing in the field. When he wanted to cross plums, he built small houses around the trees. Inside, he stuck a small hive of bees and set blossoming branches in a bowl of water. Like the Zaigers, he too hybridized plums with apricots and backcrossed with plumcots. But having followed the scuffle over the word “pluot,” he decided just to call his hybrids by a simpler name: plums.
Glen gave his own fruit tour every Tuesday morning during the season. The morning I went, there were a dozen or so people there, including several guys from Bright Brothers Nursery, which was the production arm of Bradford Genetics that propagated and sold the varieties the Bradfords developed and took a commission on each tree. There were also a couple of growers and some packing shed reps, plus a woman who worked for Top Fruit, the Bradfords’ exclusive partner in South Africa.
We set out on foot, and like everywhere else, the conversation quickly turned to the down market. People here had reached the same frustrated conclusions I’d heard elsewhere. The numbers were “devastating.” Many buyers “didn’t have a clue about the fruit business.” Much of the fruit in storage “should go into the Dumpster.” In a lot of packers’ coolers, “you had to back out to just to move around.”
Glen wondered aloud whether people might just be sick of eating bad fruit. “Two of my daughters won’t even touch plums,” he said. “It’s the same thing as ‘I burned my hand with a firecracker once.’After that, you don’t want to go near firecrackers again.” It lightened the mood a little to hear those words come out of the mouth of one of the world’s top plum breeders. There weren’t a lot of plums on the tour because most of them were tied up in an exclusive arrangement Glen had going with Mike Jackson and Kingsburg Orchards. In one sweeping deal capped by a handshake, Glen ceded Kingsburg Orchards his entire inventory of red-fleshed plums. No other California grower could have the red-fleshed plums—not even David and those other Jacksons at Family Tree Farms. (Glen had also given Kingsburg Orchards an exclusive on the black apricot that had sent David circumnavigating the globe on the hunt for flavor.)
Out in the orchard, Glen moved quickly from one tree to another. A mechanical engineer by training who’d fallen into the family business, he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d ever hear quoting Basho on the reticence of blossoms. As we walked around sampling varieties, here, too, were the same jokes about watermelons, cantaloupes, and rogue fruits. After tasting a July Bright nectarine, someone said, “Careful, it’s got a little kick to it.” Somebody else fired back, “Does that mean it’s good for France?” As I walked around, tasting, testing, putting fruit in my tote sack, I thought about an underlined passage in our copy of William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. (Elizabeth was the one who’d underlined it—I can tell by the way the line curves and thins out from left to right.) In the preface, Gass wrote, “Nature rarely loops. Nature repeats. This spring is not a former spring rethought, but merely another spring, somewhat the same, somewhat not.” This was a different COC List than the ones I’d paced off at the Zaigers’ place. These were different people and a different time, but the movements repeated, somewhat the same, somewhat not.
At one point, I hopped in a cart with a grower named Rob Mazuna, who has an unkempt ten-acre orchard near the foothills in Reedley. (His land abuts one of Gerawan’s ranches.) Rob counts his varieties not in acres but in trees, as in “I’ve got thirty-four trees of Arctic Rose,” a sublime white-flesh, sub-acid nectarine developed by the Zaigers. He sells his fruit once a week at a Sunday farmer’s market several hours away in Mountain View (incidentally the hometown of Google). Rob comes to the Bradfords’ every week, mostly for the camaraderie. Occasionally, he picks fruit from Glen’s trees to take with him several days later to the market. Today, for example, he planned to clean off a couple of albino peach trees which Glen had already shown. If he didn’t pick it, the fruit would just drop to the ground. Plus it was exactly the kind of thing that would sell at the market; the peaches were very soft, a little overripe, juicy, and melting. As we picked the fruit into a couple of boxes, Rob explained that at the farmer’s market, their being overripe didn’t matter. Size didn’t matter. Color didn’t matter either. “Elberta has no color. Flavor Gold has no color,” taking mental inventory of some of his duller varieties. Most of the things on the farmer-friendly checklist didn’t matter, because the fruit didn’t have to speak for itself at the farmer’s market. Rob could speak for it. He could chat up the people there, slice them a sample, talk to them about the history of the variety and why he planted it. He could prime the customer and then let the fruit close the deal, so the only thing that mattered was the eating experience, the flavor. Rob’s ten acres were wallowing in that. His orchard was like a COC List of the COC List, stone fruit’s greatest hits—Zaiger varieties mixed in with Bradford varieties, old-school Elberta peaches, tropical-tasting plums.
“I just plant what I like and when it’s time to pick for the market, I pick what’s ready. My wife doesn’t like me to waste the fruit. She wants me to get a cold storage unit. To me though, that’s like having a hot dog warmer. You know, you make all these hot dogs at Seven-Eleven and then you put them in that thing to keep them warm? If you have that thing to keep them warm, then you just get in the habit of making the hot dogs ahead of time. So, I use what I can and dump what ever I can’t sell.”
I thought about what one grower had said to me, that growing stone fruit had gone from being a lifestyle to being a business. Rob’s operation wasn’t much of a business. It wasn’t even much of a lifestyle. It was more like a beautiful, ten-acre art project. By the time we finished picking the albino peach, the tour was over and some of the guys were carpooling to lunch. Glen had an errand to run and he seemed a little anxious to get to it. When I got in his truck, he told me why. Mike Watts, Kingsburg Orchards’ Director of Exotic Fruit, had called Glen the day before and asked if he could swing by on his way up to a meeting with an upscale regional chain based in Modesto. The chain mostly carried Gerawan’s Prima label, and Watts wanted to blow open a new account by giving them a taste of some of the exclusive red-fleshed plums Kingsburg Orchards had on the horizon. The trees Kingsburg Orchards had growing were too young and not yet setting fruit, so Mike had asked Glen to pick a handful of boxes for him to take. We were going to meet Mike at an unmarked turnoff of Highway 99. Glen had half a dozen small boxes in the back, filled gently with fruit. Just off the northbound side of 99, we pulled off into the shade of an almond orchard.
“Have you had people gripe about the exclusive with the Jacksons?” I asked him.
He raised his eyebrows and said, “Here and all over the world.” While we waited, Glen told me how “the red-fleshed plum thing” with Kingsburg Orchards had come about. Because Bradford had been known for so long as a nectarine outfit, no one had really given their plums much of a chance. In the mid-1990s, they’d developed a line of red-fleshed plums, and had begun marketing them in their nursery cata log. But no one had been interested, in part because plums had fallen so far out of favor with growers and in part because pluots were just taking off at that point and were getting all the plum-related attention. So Glen had just moved on and kind of forgotten about them, until Kingsburg Orchards had approached him one day about doing exclusives.
Right around this time, some studies had come out about the antioxidant power of red-fleshed plums, and since no one had shown much interest in the Bradfords’ inventory, they had taken the plums to the Jacksons and said, “Want an exclusive on these?” That was several years ago now, and though none of the plums had made it out into the market yet, Glen was happy with the arrangement. Instead of taking a commission on every tree the nursery sold, Glen would get a percentage of Kingsburg Orchards’ revenue off the fruit. And because the plums were exclusive to Kingsburg Orchards, the Jacksons could control volume and marketing of the whole line. There were no fears of overplanting a variety or having it picked too soon so that it showed up in
stores hard and green.
Eventually, Mike Watts pulled up in a BMW and jumped out of the car almost before it stopped. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, red and pink with yellow flowers on it, and the effulgence fit his mood. We carried the boxes over to him, and he opened the first one and took out a piece of fruit, a small, dark purplish plum covered in chalky bloom.
“Mike!” His wife, Brenda, had rolled down the window. “Stop that!”
He turned and smiled at her. “But I’ve got to eat it! I need to know what it’s going to taste like.” He leaned forward and took a bite. “Oh!” He made a little kick. “Oh! This one is dizzy!” He waved his hand to find the right word. “Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s dizzy-sweet. It’s choke-sweet!” He was nodding at Glen for an acknowledgment of this phrase. “It hits the back of your throat and it chokes you! Here, Brenda. Try this.”
Brenda took off her seat belt and got out of the car. “He’s like a kid with a new toy.”
Mike had opened another box and was trying a different plum. “Oh my god! You have to eat this. Brenda! Here! Eat this!” He thrust the plum toward her.
“I can’t eat them both at the same time, Mike!”
“Oh, that is so sweet!” He spun around in a circle.
We loaded the boxes into the backseat of the BMW, and then the Wattses were gone as quickly as they’d come, like a three-gag Vaudeville act between sets.
4
WE CAN DELIVER the best box of fruit in the world, but at the end of the day, it’s the guys in the green aprons—the guys who are stocking the fruit in the store—who are the gatekeepers. And as an industry, we have no contact with them.”
David Jackson was mulling this problem over in a small club chair in the sitting area of Family Tree Farms’ sales and marketing department. Through a large window, he could look across the street and check on the progress of the golf course. Sprinklers were now watering great expanses of sod. The occasional tree broke the landscape, and in the distance, construction on the clubhouse was under way.
Like Blair Richardson and FreshSense, Family Tree was always trying to figure out how to reach farther into the store to better market its fruit. They’d been scheming about it for years. Finally, one day, somebody at Family Tree hatched the brilliant idea of bringing the store to them. Just like that, Flavor Tech was born: a two-day, round-the-clock cram session designed for produce managers and buyers from Family Tree’s retail partners. “We wanted to show those guys in the green aprons what it takes to make a piece of fruit. So we bring a group of them out and cover things like the difference between taste and flavor, how we pro cess flavor, the psychology of a purchase, all those kinds of things. They leave here with a diploma and their chests are pumped up. Then, they go home and they talk. And we see sales jump in those stores.”
This morning, half a dozen produce managers from a regional chain in the Midwest were coming to town for Flavor Tech, but their flight had been delayed out of Chicago and they were running an hour or two late. With some time to kill, I drove around Dinuba.
Right outside of town, there was a big, new development going in, Sugar Plum Estates. (If suburbs elsewhere were often named for the natural thing they had replaced, in the Valley they were often named for the crop that had already replaced the natural thing.) Since my last visit, a new retail cluster had sprung up on the perimeter of Dinuba’s Wal-Mart Supercenter, which itself was only a year old. When the cluster was finished, there would be a Krogen Auto Parts, a Dollar Tree, and some species of quickie mart. Whenever I was in the orbit of a Wal-Mart Supercenter, I liked to run in and check the produce. Today, the very first thing visible in the store was a massive, detached rack of black plums with a sign announcing that they were on sale for $1.00 per pound. (Usually, they were $1.74.) Some of them were labeled with the 4039 PLU stickers: small plums. Others were 4040s, normal-size plums. I hovered for fifteen or twenty minutes, watching to see if anyone went for the plums. No one did. Most people didn’t even seem to notice them. They could have been invisible. The rest of the produce selection loomed beyond the plums, and in the much smaller bin of pluots, there were a few different varieties represented, including some early Dapple Dandies. The pluots were $2.94 per pound. Aside from some dark cherries that were a little over $3.00 per pound, the pluots were the most expensive item in the produce section. I bought a couple of plums and a couple of pluots, and sat in the parking lot eating them. They could have used a day in a paper sack to ripen, but all of them tasted pretty good. I still hadn’t had a bad plum all summer.
When I got back to Family Tree, the produce managers were still on the way from the Fresno airport, so I sat down to chat with Family Tree’s marketing director, a stone fruit lifer named Don Goforth. Don had been in the business for twenty-five years and was active in the Produce Marketing Association, the national trade or ga niza tion that, among other things, doled out PLU numbers. (He’d sat on the board that reviewed the request for a “pluot” code.) He’d probably thought about marketing stone fruit as much as anyone on the planet, and he’d come around to the opinion that the word “pluot” was not cutting it.
Lately, his team had been getting some resistance from retailers over the name. Some of it was familiar territory from the Interspecific Task Force days and the “if it walks like a duck” debate. What exactly was a pluot? How was it different than a plum? This resistance was especially frustrating because the marketers had really been trying to brand the word “pluot” as something new and different, hoping that it would leapfrog some of the negative feelings people had about plums and get the consumer to associate the word with a perception of better flavor. Anecdotally, the word was said to have caught on in some “foodie” circles, but the stores were also reporting a lot of confusion on the consumer end, a sign that the word had not penetrated far enough. Another problem was that all those high-flavor interspecific plums that Family Tree had gotten from the overseas breeders couldn’t be called “pluots,” because the word was a trademark owned by the Zaigers. And so the word they were pushing as the new and better thing could never be as inclusive as it needed to be.
There was another, more fundamental issue, and it was with the word itself—namely, it’s not obvious how to pronounce “pluot” just by looking at it. It’s one of only six words in the English language that ends in the letters “-uot.” There aren’t too many more words with that sequence of letters anywhere. By Merriam-Webster’s count, there are sixty-six of them, and in all but just a few, the “u” is preceded by a “q” and is silent—as in “quote.” But in “pluot,” the “u” counts, and the tendency is to go French with the second syllable, as I first did when I asked the guy at the farmer’s market what the deal was with the “plew-ohs.” Even if you know that the word is a merger of “plum” and “apricot,” the sound doesn’t make much sense, because the “u” in “plum” is short while the “u” in “pluot” is long.“Pluot” looks like a word someone’s left a letter out of. When I told Don about all the grocery store displays I’d seen—plucots, plumots, plouts—he nodded. He’d seen them, too.
“We’ve really pushed the word ‘pluot’—not just Family Tree, others in the industry, too—but when people can’t pronounce it, it’s tough to get it to stick. You’re always trying to tell people that it’s a cross between a plum and an apricot, but it’s hard to see that in the name. In just looking at the name, there’s no way to even tell that it’s a food.”
There was a growing sense then that, as a brand, “pluot” was neither functional nor evocative. In response, Don said, there was talk among industry marketers of lumping all high-flavor, interspecific plums into a category called “plumcots.” Since Burbank’s days, the word “plumcot” had been used almost exclusively to describe fifty-fifty crosses between plums and apricots, like the Zaigers’ early hybrid, Flavorella. But nowhere was it written that a plumcot had to be fifty-fifty, and so the word was getting a lot of attention as a possible catchall. “It’s a better word,” said Don. “
What it is is right there in the name. We’ve done some informal consumer surveys and people have said, ‘Plumcot I can understand. Pluot makes no sense.’ And as much as we like to think otherwise, in reality, ‘pluot’ doesn’t have enough traction for us not to say, ‘Hey, we can rename this and start to call it a ‘plumcot.’ ” Though its existence was little known and it was almost never used, the plumcot did have its own PLU code: 3126. If the industry could get the same color breakdown as plums had—red plumcots, black plumcots, and so on—then the whole high-flavor, interspecific marketing issue might be at least partially resolved. After all the task forces and hearings, they could retire the word “pluot” once and for all.
“From there, you could work on flavor profiles,” he said.
“ ‘This tastes like that,’ and so on, so that you can have people excited about a whole line of fruit that you can work into your programs.”
The eight produce managers had just arrived from the airport in Fresno, and Don went in to greet them. The group moved into a conference room and said their hellos. The produce managers were from places like Davenport, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska; and Rochester, Minnesota. They were a hardy bunch, and they’d all been working for the regional chain for at least a decade, many of them two. As they introduced themselves, they sounded the same alarm: “Wal-Mart’s hurting us” or “Wal-Mart opened up against us two years ago” or “Wal-Mart’s the heaviest competition but we’re holding pretty strong.” It felt like a brigadier’s report from the Mongol front.
Don gave a short spiel on Family Tree—family owned, Christian values, vertically integrated—and then summed up the point of Flavor Tech. “We believe that if we grow good fruit, we will be successful. We’re committed to the satisfaction of the end consumer, and so with us, it’s all about flavor. It’s that simple.” There were nods around the table. That was simple.
The Perfect Fruit Page 16