How 100 Billion Cranberries Are Harvested In 6 Weeks | Big Business

all of these cranberries end up as sauce craisins or in juice bottles like this one made famous by this viral tick-tock since it was posted on september 25th the video has been viewed over 70 million times and soon it was copied by celebrities and tick-tockers across the globe it was so popular that retailers struggled to keep ocean spray crane raspberry juice on shelves but just as the video took off ocean spray farms across the northeast were heading into their busiest season harvest and holiday prep fall harvest is a wonderful thing but it's our most busy time of the year by far the company has only six weeks to harvest a hundred billion cranberries all of that sudden demand and a pandemic made an already rushed harvest even harder so how did ocean spray do it hey mike hi allison how are you honey awesome how are you well it all starts here in the bog you might recognize it from those commercials hi we're ocean spray cranberry growers and this is our 100 juice starting in the middle of september the gilmore family begins preparing its hundred acres of bogs for the wet harvest normally the bogs look like this come right on dry fields you can walk on this and not damage it the cranberries grow just like this in a layer of sand peat gravel and clay we use water to harvest the cranberries but they don't grow submerged in water some of the cranberry vines here on the bog are almost 90 years old when it's time to harvest allison will flood the bog with about a foot of water once we add the water the cranberries start to float on the vine cranberries have four pockets of air inside to knock the berries off those vines farmers use a cranberry harvesting machine you can fairly easily take them right off the harrow that ben is using he actually built that the berries pop off and float to the top then for the fun part farmers strap on some waders and trudge out into the water the cranberries are all floating to the top and we're standing on top of the vines there isn't anything quite like the experience of standing in a bog but it does feel like i'm being hugged by all the cranberries i do love that as you can see this is a wide open space and we have put in place all the cdc guidelines we are socially distanced by the nature of when we are farming and we've put in masks from inside the bog farmers use what's called a boom to corral all the berries bobbing on the surface one of the things that is surprisingly difficult is pulling the boom it's heavy 100 of ocean sprays cranberries are grown sustainably but not only is wet harvest environmentally friendly it's also efficient allison's family can harvest up to 10 acres a day we are harvesting in all different weather we work every day for six seven weeks whatever it takes eight weeks sometimes the berry pump right over here we can come over here and see and as you can see we're paddling and gently pushing the cranberries into that pump that's right there the paddle helps to control the rate of which the cranberries are going into the pump and the pump gently takes the cranberries up into a truck called the berry washer the fruit is coming up through here it builds up and then as it moves along it goes in here where there's a break and all the proof gets washed and it goes into the back of the truck those trucks say goodbye to gilmore farm and head out to the receiving station just up the road here trucks coming from massachusetts and rhode island line up by the dozens waiting their turn to unload once in front they back up and get locked into this giant lift hydraulics lift the front end up and all the berries tumble out the back the berries are cleaned again to get rid of the rest of the leaves and vine bits then they're boxed and sent to one of the manufacturing plants one and a half million barrels will be processed here in just over a month it'll take the manufacturing plants a year to go through all those berries over at the plant in middleborough massachusetts berries are turned into the products we see on the shelves we process all the fruit freeze it and then when it's frozen we can slice it to make that optimal sweet dry cranberry that's scott head of engineering here we're gonna go out to our fruit delivery area and see where the fruit comes in and we kick start the process it's gonna be very loud so we'll be wearing ear protection and ppe to continue operating under covet 19 restrictions ocean spray had to implement temperature checks mandatory masks and social distancing in its factories after suiting up we followed scott into the freezer we store 3.1 million pounds in our local freezer which is about two days of production the berries chosen for craisins juice or sauce have to be frozen first once it's frozen it breaks down the cellular structure inside the cranberry and allows the juice to be released and processed [Music] after they're frozen the berries are spiked to break them up frozen fruit comes into the process then we slice it we defrost it and then we extract those juice from the berry this is where we're extracting the juice once they've got the juice it's sent here to become a concentrate that concentrate heads to another facility where the water juices and other ingredients are added in to become the now very famous juice about 4 400 cranberries go into a typical bottle of cranberry juice but after the juice gets extracted those leftover berries don't just get thrown away they become the dried cranberries called craisins as the fruit enters the dryer it's a 210 foot dryer that has three stages where we dry the fruit to the customer's specification once there's no liquid left the dried cranberries can get flavorings today we're running strawberry on our production line it smells like strawberry shortcake in the facilities now for the sauce ocean spray's first product introduced back in 1930. this year ocean spray expects americans to buy nearly 60 million cans of the stuff for the holidays the berries get ground up into a puree about 200 berries along with sweeteners go into each can of jellied sauce the process hasn't changed so much some of the equipment we use and some of the training that's required the personnel has but the general concept has not changed in almost 90 years once all the products are finished they're packaged up and this robot does all the boxing this is our finished goods cooler where we store product that's waiting to go out to the customer we have 3 500 pallet spots in here and a total of 5 500 at the site so less than three weeks we turn all the inventory over here in the cooler between all the flavors of craisins juice and sauce ocean spray has more than 250 skus or product types on shelves across the globe 50 of it goes to europe and then the rest goes to our distribution centers here in the united states due to the demand from the viral tick tock and the harvest season ocean spray says the plants are operating more than normal the south harbor receiving center and the middleborough plant had to hire over 230 seasonal employees while ocean spray has increased production the company says it's too soon to tell how the tick tock actually affected sales i think everybody enjoyed it i think a lot of us attempted at home or had family members that saw it it was really fun it was nice to be able to bring some good vibes to everyone

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 2,767,639

Rating: 4.9034219 out of 5

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, big business, cranberry, cranberries, industry, harvest, farming, harvesting

Id: -Io188EOB4s

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/cellis12]

I love cranberries, cool video.

[u/ThePanth]

Cool video. Great to see how they are processed.