Fairway Market has been running a case lot sale and as part of it has been offering a very good deal on the 3.78 litre pure apple juice from SunRype. I was happy to see the size because we go through more than litre of juice a dinner without any problem. The price for the juice is roughly the same per litre, which is nice to see.I had not really paid enough attention till we started to talk about how nice it was to have a larger juice container. It was then that I thought about it, this is a 3.78 litre container, that is a mini-gallon from the US. Why is SunRype using these heavier and smaller containers when I know there is a very cost effective source of 4 litre containers in Canada. Why a US sized container?
SunRype was created in 1946 by the Fruit Growers Association as a way to make use of the apples that could not be sold - juice apples do not need to look good. Like most people in BC, I grew up with the blue label 2 quart juice tins and then in 1979 the 1 litre tetra-pak. Apple juice has meant SunRype to me for as far back as I can remember.
For 50 years it was an Okanagan based grower owned cooperative based out of Kelowna. In 1996 it became a publicly traded company. It is not quite majority owned by Jim Pattison now. The company is still based in Kelowna but is has plants elsewhere now.
In recent years the company expanded across Canada and 2008 has been in the US, I think that was through the acquisition of Washington based companies like Naumes Concentrates in 2011 and Yakama Juice in 2010.
Now back to the juice being in a US container, I looked at the back of the container and you can see in bold letters at the bottom - Product of USA. Seriously? Even SunRype now gets their juice from the US? Even then it is strange they use US container sizes, SunRype does not sell any juice in the US.
1 comment:
The business machine that packs, stores, processes, and retails the fruit after it leaves the farm has become the tail that wags the dog.
The tragedy/insanity of this is that the growers themselves voted to sell their shares in Sun-Rype. I don't think anyone realized the long term repercussions of this choice: the grower returns for culls dropped dramatically, Sun Rype purchased processing facilities in Washington State, and most notably: their flagship, Blue Label apple juice (arguably one of the best tasting products in the world) doesn't have the same flavour that it used to. The farmer loses, the consumer loses.
There is a HUGE disconnect between growing fruit and participating in what happens to it afterward. Growers don't knowingly make dreadful business choices: the best place for a farmer is "out standing in his field" and quite frankly that leaves precious little time for anything else. Reality demands that all growers COLLECTIVELY need to shoulder additional responsiblity in the oversight of the business end of our industry. We neglect it at our own peril.
Thanks for bringing attention to this issue: consumer support is fundamental to retaining the quality and availability of locally grown and processed produce.
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