Maine Produces Tab

MACHIAS — Blue fields stretch from the road to the forest’s edge.

Blue fields? Whatever happened to green fields?

Until harvesters bring the last berries into the processing plants in mid-September, the barrens that spread across Down East Maine glisten blue in the summer sun. Thanks to abundant rain that fell at the right times, improved agricultural practices, and warm sunshine, blueberries cover the land like so many blue droplets from heaven. Maine will enjoy its largest blueberry crop ever in 1990, easily surpassing the record 52 million berries harvested two years ago.

Yet the best growing conditions and efforts in the world will never avail if someone does not process the berries. That’s where the Maine Wild Blueberry Co. in Machias steps in.

In the fall of 1983, two Washington County men, Frederick “Bud” Kneeland from Cherryfield and Robert Foster Sr. from Machias, formed a berry-processing company and set up shop in a former textile mill on Route 192 in Machias. Many Down East residents knew Kneeland from his affiliation with another blueberry processor and Foster from his ownership of R.H. Foster Inc. “Bud and Bob are two very astute businessmen with extensive experience in the industry,” said Amr Ismail, the Maine Wild Blueberry president whose own ties with the fruit date to his years as a graduate student at the University of Maine in the late 1960s. He left the university as a horticulture professor in 1984 to become Maine Wild Blueberry’s executive vice president.

Kneeland and Foster knew the challenges that their fledgling firm faced: establishing suppliers, getting new processing equipment up and running, and developing customers.

They set modest goals: employing 30 people year-round and up to 100 people during the peak of the harvest season (late July to mid-September), freezing 5 million pounds of berries at the Machias plant, and storing 3 million pounds on-site.

Today, after three expansions to its physical plant, Maine Wild Blueberry employs 125 people year-round, increases its seasonal workforce to 300, freezes 15 million pounds of blueberries in Machias, and stores more than 12 million pounds on-site. Within six years, the company increased its plant from 47,000 square feet to more than 100,000 square feet.

Maine Wild Blueberry is the largest private employer in Machias and the second largest in Washington County.

The company’s success partially coincided with largescale growth in the state’s low-bush blueberry industry, growth attributed to increased demand for wild blueberries both in the United States and worldwide. According to Ismail, the Wild Blueberry Association of North America helped “promote and enhance the marketing position of wild blueberries.”

This led to greater product availability (“you can’t sell from an empty wagon,” Ismail said) and the industry’s ability to provide a consistently better quality blueberry. Production in Maine more than doubled during the last decade, and the state now grows 50-to-55 percent of North America’s wild blueberries. The remaining growers (in order of declining quantity) are Nova Scotia, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island.

Maine Wild Blueberry developed its own markets, too. Among other products, the company’s berries appear in: Pillsbury and Duncan Hines blueberry muffix mixes; Pepperidge Farm blueberry turnovers;

Jell-O fruit rolls; Deering Wild Maine Blueberry ice cream; Quaker Oats’ Fruit & Cream instant oatmeal; Pillsbury Hungry Jack blueberry pancakes; Betty Crocker products, canned blueberries, pie fillings, and products made by Kraft, General Foods, Entenmann’s, and Hostess.

Maine Wild Blueberry also processes apples and cranberries. The latter are imported from Cape Cod to be canned for Ocean Spray muffin mixes.

During the last six years, Maine Wild Blueberry has participated in the introduction of 12 new blueberry products in North America, “an outstanding record for a young company,” Ismail said. The company routinely works with major food producers to develop new food products.

But Maine Wild Blueberry could not sell its berries without processing them first.

Throughout the harvest season, trucks back into the plant’s docks, where company employees unload large, heavy plastic containers filled with berries.

White letters spell “Maine Wild Blueberry” on many containers; others bear names from Washington County farms. No matter the name emblazoned on its side, each container comes filled with wild blueberries.

According to Dennis Fisher, who is the quality control director at Maine Wild Blueberry, the secret to properly processing berries picked only hours earlier lies in freezing them as soon as possible. Too long a wait adversely affects the berries; in this business, there cannot be too short a wait.

Working around the clock at Maine Wild Blueberry, forklifts carry pallets laden with berry containers to the first processing station, where employees tip the contents onto angled conveyor belts. The belts carry the berries and assorted field debris (twigs, leaves, rocks, etc.) through an air cleaner, which blows air through the berries to remove lightweight plant material.

Then the berries bounce across a series of vibrating screens. Each screen contains holes with a set diameter. The berries fall through the berry-sized holes, while larger rocks and other material bounce farther until slipping through larger-diameter holes.

Beyond this point, the berries plunge into a water bath that rinses and separates them from any material not yet removed by the air cleaner or the vibrating screens.

The next stop exposes the berries to Antarctica — in Maine, in September.

A conveyor belt carries the blueberries into a FrigoScandia freezer tunnel (Maine Wild Blueberry operates two). Here, where the temperature seldom rises above -40 F, frigid air blowing at 70 miles per hour kicks the berries into the air. The -110 F wind chill instantly freezes everything that resembles a blueberry.

Ismail and Fisher called this process “individually quick frozen,” or IQF. Fisher explained that freezing the berries immediately prevented a berry’s cell structure from crystalizing and breaking down as it would during a longer, slower freezing process.

The freezer tunnels handle 26,000 to 28,000 pounds of blueberries an hour, or more than 500,000 pounds a day. During the berry harvest, the tunnels run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Once frozen, the blueberries drop into a destemming reel that breaks off and separates from the berries any stems left from picking.

Then the frozen berries move along more conveyor belts past employees who remove any remaining defective berries. Berries that pass inspection move to metal hoppers to be dumped into wooden “totes,” crate-sized containers that hold 1,250 pounds of berries apiece. A forklift takes the filled totes to the cold-storage warehouses installed along two walls.

Maine Wild Blueberry ships its berries either frozen or canned. A hopper can fill 30-pound boxes with frozen berries; the company ships these boxes to customers wanting only frozen blueberries.

Many customers prefer canned berries, however. To accommodate them, Maine Wild Blueberry operates a modern canning line that processes cans ranging in size from 3 1/2-ounce cans to be inserted into muffin mixes to 20-ounce cans designed for institutional use. Unlike the freezer tunnels, which run until the last berries are processed, the canning line runs year-round…

…except during the harvest season, when everything else stops as berries pour into Machias. Blueberries will not remain on the plant very long, and the first frost signals the season’s finale.

Until the fields turn green again in mid-September, the work never stops at Maine Wild Blueberry, the company built by hard work, savvy, and determination.

But Maine Wild Blueberry did not achieve such success just because the wild blueberry industry as a whole increased its market share. Equally vital factors included a reliable labor force, loyal growers and suppliers, and the vision provided by Kneeland and Foster.

“The excellent work ethic of the employees here has made a big difference for us,” Ismail said. “We’ve seen total loyalty on the part of our workers and a ability to work long and hard to make the company a success.”

He praised the growers, too, for their help. “It’s very important that we have adequate supply to meet the demands of our customers and to keep a good inventory on hand to meet the needs for the introduction of new products,” Ismail said.

“Our growers help us achieve these goals,” he stated. “For the past several seasons, the berry industry has been profitable, and growers and processors alike have reinvested in their fields and equipment.”

By adopting better agricultural methods like improved weed control and greater use of honeybees for pollination, Maine growers have more than doubled the blueberry yield from their land, Ismail said. Some growers have expanded their land by restoring overgrown fields to productive use. Ismail believes that the potential exists to grow yet more berries on the existing barrens, but future increases will be incremental, not explosive as in the past. While the state can grow 40 to 50 million pounds on average, the processors can freeze more than 60 million pounds. “Processing capacity should balance growth in the fields,” Ismail said.

Maine Wild Blueberry owns some blueberry land, maintains long-term leases on other fields, and “has informal and formal agreements with many growers in eastern Maine,” Ismail said. To extend the processing season, broaden its supply base, and offer some protection against crop failure in a particular region, the company also processes blueberries from New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

“Bud Kneeland is an aggressive, hard-working entrepreneur who has given very tremendous effort and leadership to bring the company from zero to where it is today,” Ismail said.

“He and Bob Foster took a gamble. They’ve worked very hard, made astute business decisions, and kept at it. They recognized an opportunity and went for it,” he said. “All I’m doing is carrying on what they started.”