Blame It on the Juice

If it seems that fresh cranberries are harder to find than they used to be, you’re right. Despite more than doubling the total amount of cranberries grown, fresh cranberry production for this year is just slightly more than half of what it was in 1978.

Blame it on the juice. Today, more than 80% of the cranberry crop today goes to drinks; 20 years ago it around 50%. And the percentage was even lower before that. In fact, until the early 1960s, cranberry juice was mainly a little-known regional product.

That changed, though, on Nov. 9, 1959, a day that still lives in infamy in the boggy country around Massachusetts and Rhode Island. That was the day that Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Arthur Fleming held a press conference to announce that a pesticide used on some cranberry bogs was believed to be carcinogenic.

Never mind that that chemical had been used only on isolated bogs in the Pacific Northwest, far from the mainstream cranberry crop, the public panicked. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

Skip Colcord, manager of marketing communications for Ocean Spray, the largest cooperative of cranberry growers, still has a catch in his voice when he talks about that time. “The words cancer and food had never been associated before,” he says. “And it happened right before Thanksgiving. People just stopped buying cranberries, and the business almost went under because of it.”

In hindsight, though, it turned out to be a good thing. “The short-term results were obviously negative; for three or four years, the industry really struggled,” says Colcord. “But the long-term has been very positive.”

Growers were so leery of again getting caught with an entire harvest of fresh cranberries they couldn’t sell that they began casting about for new products. Cranberry juice was the result.

“They had to reformulate it to fit the taste preferences of the general public, instead of a bunch of old New England cranberry growers,” says Colcord. “But once they got it to the sweetness level consumers were used to, it really took off.”

So good were the long-term benefits of the cranberry catastrophe that this year--even with a slightly short crop because of the New England drought--the total cranberry harvest will be more than triple what it was in 1959.