Berry trade group to meet in Bangor

BANGOR – The business minds behind the marketing of wild blueberries will gather Tuesday and Wednesday for the annual meeting of the Wild Blueberry Association of North America.

About 50 people whose careers are based on the little blue fruit will meet at the Sheraton Four Points Airport Hotel. The attendees are mostly representatives of processing companies in Maine and Atlantic Canada and some growers, plus researchers whose good-news announcements keep the fruit at the top of popular healthful-foods lists.

The trade group will present its marketing plan for 2004, buoyed by record supplies from all segments of the blueberry industry in 2003: the wild blueberry harvests in Maine and Canada and the cultivated (highbush) blueberry harvests of a dozen other states.

WBANA executive director John Sauve said that “2003 was a record year all around” last week from his office in Bar Harbor. “Demand is so strong, the business of berries is better than ever.”

National and international interest in blueberries as a health story is far different from local concerns for the industry. Although the still-not-resolved lawsuit involving three Down East processors hovers in the Maine courts, that likely won’t get a moment of discussion in the public portion of the meetings.

In the closed-door part of the meetings, however, the inner workings of WBANA – with its annual budget in excess of $1 million – will be the main topic of business this week.

After 23 years of Canadians and Mainers working hand in hand to promote wild blueberries, tensions have developed in the last year over the division of labor and how WBANA’s money gets spent.

WBANA’s board will consider restructuring how the U.S. and Canadian sides make decisions.

The proposed structure is intended to ensure money put into WBANA from Canadian growers and processors is equal to what comes from the Maine side. Further, that Canadian money will be spent on marketing of the fruit in Canada, and Maine money will be spent on marketing in the United States.

WBANA gets its funding directly from the taxation of growers and processors. In Maine, the Wild Blueberry Commission collects three-quarters of a penny for every pound growers and processors turn in.

“The key issue we are looking at is parity,” said Sanford Kelley, a Jonesport grower and WBANA president. “We hope we can put that to bed at this meeting. But it’s a board decision, and there are 19 people on that board.”

Of the 19 directors, 10 are from Canada: three from Quebec, three from Nova Scotia, two from New Brunswick, one from Prince Edward Island and one from Newfoundland.

The rest of the directors come from Maine, including the group’s only female, grower Linda Long of Sedgwick. Other directors who are growers are Kelly and Ivan Hanscom of Marshfield.

Maine board members representing processors are Kermit Allen of G.M. Allen of Orland; Roy Allen of Allen’s Blueberry Freezer of Ellsworth; Ed Flanagan of Jasper Wyman and Son of Milbridge; William Guptill of Guptill Farms of Wesley; Ragnar Kamp of Cherryfield Foods Inc.; and Del Merrill of Merrill Blueberry Farms of Ellsworth.

WBANA meetings take place each spring. They alternate between sites in Maine and Canada.