Berry industry achieves goal with fresh ideas

MACHIAS — The wild blueberry industry passed another milestone Thursday, Feb. 16, in its new-products campaign by introducing “frozen fresh” wild blueberries in Washington County stores.

The breakthrough in packaging and marketing of Maine’s official berry is the latest development in the industry’s effort to provide fresh-tasting, wild blueberries in an individually packaged quantity. Also, the fruit is light blue, an improvement over individually quick frozen berries that are darker in color.

Sanford Kelley, a spokesman for Pleasant River Canning Co. of Columbia Falls, said his new product comes in a pint-sized, see-through plastic clamshell box and is “as close to fresh blueberries as you can get without harvesting them yourself in August.”

An avalanche of new wild blueberry products and advertising has begun hitting marketplaces worldwide this year, according to John Sauve, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Association of North America. The association, established by Maine and Canadian wild blueberry growers, is funded by a self-imposed tax used to create new markets for the industry at large.

Sauve, who has an office in Bar Harbor, was a recent guest lecturer for business management students at the University of Maine at Machias. He described the intense competition between wild blueberries and the cultivated variety as “the blueberry battlefield.”

He said that 170 million pounds of cultivated blueberries are harvested annually. In comparison, “the wild troops” in North America harvest about 125 million pounds from 30,000 acres. The wild growers have tripled production in the last 10 years.

While growers of the larger cultivated berries are planting more “high-bush” vines, thousands of acres of forested land are being cleared for wild, or low-bush, blueberry production that will require about eight years before becoming commercially productive. Most of the new berry fields are being developed in western Washington County.

All of the new land, together with many old fields, is being leveled by removing field rocks and filling holes and other surface depressions.

Mechanical harvesting machines are being used more to help reduce the cost of harvesting. Fewer field workers, using hand-held rakes, are being called back to the six-week annual harvests. With reduced harvesting costs and decreased use of herbicides and pesticides, wild blueberries are becoming more competitive with the cultivated variety and other fruits.

Cherryfield Foods Inc. of Cherryfield, a division of Oxford Frozen Foods at Oxford, Nova Scotia, is developing most of the new farm fields. CFI is the largest blueberry landowner in the state.

Massive irrigation systems have been installed during the last five years by both CFI and by the Jasper Wyman Co. of Milbridge. The underground systems are used to prevent frosts from damaging plants and crops, as well as to guarantee adequate moisture to fields during periods of drought.