A town clerk, a beekeeper and a cranberry grower walk into the marsh...

Say hello to Lisa Rezin. Along with her husband Chris, the two run Rezin Berries, LLC in Cranmoor, Wisconsin. As the name suggests, Cranmoor – please don’t call them bogs here – is one of the Cooperative's largest producers of cranberries in the United States. Comparatively, the Rezins' marsh is one of the smaller marshes in town with 32 acres.

As a family of fifth generation cranberry growers, the Rezins' marsh keeps them busy year-round. During the growing season, Lisa doubles as the beekeeper while her daughter handles the local farmers' market selling honey. Then after the harvest and as the holidays approach, Chris Rezin waits for the first signs of winter to begin preparing the marsh for dormancy.

"He's the only man I know who gets excited to take a deep breath of bitter, cold air and feel the inside of his nose hairs freeze" says Lisa. "That's when he knows he put the water on the marsh at the right time."

Harsh winters are dangerous to the cranberry vines and require special protection post-harvest. This usually begins in December after the vines have turned a deep crimson color - a sign that the plants have gone dormant. The vines are flooded with water and frozen to form that layer of ice across the marsh for up to 10 days which Chris' nose hairs appreciated all that cold air. If needed, a second layer is added during the next arctic cold spell and the two layers fuse together to create insulation for the vines during the rest of the winter season.

The next stage that the Rezins are preparing for is sanding, which involves spreading a thin layer ( about 5/8 inch) of sand atop the ice. A bed is sanded on a three year rotation, so every year the Rezins sand one third their acreage - about 11 acres. As the weather warms and season changes, the ice will melt and the sand will gently settle through the vines, controlling insects and ridding of any weeds at the bottom. In the meantime, there are plenty of equipment upgrades to keep the Rezins busy-they do build a lot of their own specialized equipment.

As for Lisa (who acts as Cranmoor town clerk) the last step in her winter season is the exhilarating task of preparing the town's end of year bookkeeping. So how will the Rezins celebrate the end of the long winter season? The town clerk, beekeeper and cranberry grower will walk away from the marsh and onto a plane to Arizona, for a warm week at the Ocean Spray Annual Growers Meeting.

Past Irene’s snow-banked bog, past the grand colonial Ocean Spray headquarters, is the cooperative’s smaller Sensory Research Lab building in Lakeville/Middleboro, Massachusetts. It’s where much of the tasting magic happens—at times seeing 120 voluntary testers a day. Anyone is welcome to apply to be an Ocean Spray® tester, with the exception of employees, grower-owners and their relatives. Still, the majority of testers are local to the area, and in this cranberry-loving community it’s near impossible not to have a connection to a grower or farm.

Once inside the building, testers enter a clean, bright room with individual booths recently upgraded with computerized questionnaires to guide them through the process. In addition to the product samples provided, each booth includes a pitcher of cool filtered water and unsalted crackers to cleanse the palette. From start to finish, the tasting process takes less than 30 minutes to complete.

For today, testing is focused on a new flavor in development for Ocean Spray® PACt™ cranberry extract water. A recent addition to the Ocean Spray® product line, Ocean Spray® PACt™ cranberry extract water contains PACs, or proanthocyanidins – unique, powerful elements found deep inside cranberries, to help cleanse and purify your body better than water alone.[1]. Developing and perfecting the formula has been an exciting project for Sensory Scientist Michael Nestrud. With a strong culinary background and degrees in food and sensory science, Michael leads and manages operations of Ocean Spray’s global sensory science team. His expertise in culinary psychology and ever-growing knowledge in sensory and flavor strategy proves that there’s so much more to taste than “mmm.”

In fact, Michael explains that deciphering what tasters experience can be more difficult than simply adjusting the flavors or changing formulas. While some may experience a flavor as salty, sweet, sour or bitter, Michael and his team evaluate these sensations at a molecular level. Flavors perceived as too sweet or bitter may actually need adjustments in levels of acidity. Whereas flavors that seem weak or lost may be a result of tastebuds adapting to new sensations—for example, did you know most gum retains 80% of its flavor after it’s been chewed?

There is a host of outside factors that the sensory science team investigates when testing a product, including scent, temperature, color and clarity. For example, the release of Cran-Mango™ Cranberry Juice Drink had an interesting testing process involving the debate between clear or unfiltered juice. We all recognize cranberry juice cocktail as crisp, clear and crimson, but how would a person expect mango to appear? Changing clarity doesn’t physically affect taste, but after rounds of testing, tasters preferred their Cran-Mango™ juice to have an authentic, unfiltered appearance.

Currently, the Ocean Spray labs have over 1,200 taste-testers in their registry. In addition to on-site testing, Ocean Spray offers at-home test kits that include product samples and access to the global Ocean Spray tasting website. After testing locally, a new product is then tested nationally in large metropolitan areas such as Boston, Chicago, Dallas or Los Angeles. And thanks to at-home tests and cloud-based software, the same product taste tests can be conducted internationally—usually two to three times a month before results and final decisions are reached.

The most interesting thing about it all? Translating tester comments. Instead of asking about direct flavor sensations, the team gets creative in their questioning to better determine what testers experience. Are the flavors balanced? Is the product more tart or sweet? Does the flavor linger, feel dry, or make you want to drink more?

“For the average consumer, cranberry by itself is one of the most difficult flavors to recognize,” says Michael Nestrud.

Want to put your tastebuds to the test? Join the Cranberry Club for a chance to taste test new Ocean Spray® products at home. Or if you’re local to the area, apply to be a taste tester at our Lakeville/Middleboro facility here.

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[1] *PACs (Proanthocyanidins) found in cranberries are not found in water. Furthermore, clinical/research shows that subjects drinking cranberry beverages containing unique cranberry PACs, like PACt, have similar anti-stick activities in the urine (Kaspar et al., 2013; Mathison et al., 2014).

On Friday, August 29th, Ocean Spray’s team at our Bordentown, NJ facility produced the plant’s last case for retail sale. This case (of Ocean Spray® Ruby Red!), marked the conclusion of 71 years of continuous production operations at the plant. While Bordentown is still busy with shutdown work, this is a major milestone in our transition to the new Lehigh Valley Beverage Facility. The countdown to this moment began four years ago, when the Cooperative announced plans to close the aging Bordentown facility (parts of which date back to before the Civil War) and transition operations to a new facility in nearby Pennsylvania.  Eighty-eight members of Team Bordentown are pictured with the "last case” of Ocean Spray® Cranberry Juice Cocktail, but a lot more contributed to this moment. About 100 of our colleagues have already transferred to Lehigh Valley, some have retired, and some have pursued other employment opportunities.  The entire Cooperative is excited to see the unique Bordentown culture, which focuses on safety and ownerships, flourish in our new facility but wanted to take this moment to thank our colleagues, friends, and partners in Bordentown for all their hard work and dedication to Ocean Spray® over the past 70 plus years.

Our current crop of North American cranberries is already looking strong and for that, we have the tiny bee to thank.  Cranberries are among the many fruit and vegetable crops that depend on bees for pollination – a daunting task given that an average acre of cranberry plants produces about 20 million white blooms each spring. Each flower must be visited at least once by a pollinator in order to turn the cranberry bloom into a white berry. The berries turn their characteristic crimson hue in August and September as they continue to ripen.  

Given the essential role that pollination plays in a successful cranberry crop, many farmers transport honeybee colonies to their bogs. Today, however, managed honeybee hives in the U.S. are besieged by mites, beetles and microbes that cause devastating disease. With the swift decline in the honeybee population, the role of native or “wild” bees— solitary insects that nest in the ground or inside vegetation—has become critical. In fact, native pollinators, such as the blue orchard bee, help fertilize crops worth an estimated $3 billion each year.

Ocean Spray has partnered with groups such as the Native Pollinators in Agriculture (NPIA) to encourage native bee pollinators, which are more resistant to pests than their honeybee counterparts, to make their home in cranberry bogs.  The NPIA has counseled Ocean Spray growers on planting crops that bloom during different times of the year to keep the native pollinators interested in and living near their bogs. 

Ocean Spray has also partnered with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to fund entomological research on native bee species. One small blue bee that the ARS is studying comes from a family that makes its nest in stems, branches, fence posts, tree trunks, and aboveground areas. Entomologists have been encouraging the bee to take up residence in cranberry bogs in New Jersey by providing plenty of wood blocks with holes drilled in them as possible nesting material. 

There is still much research to be done on the collapse of managed honeybee colonies across the U.S. and on the best methods for safeguarding and promoting native pollinators. What is certain is that Ocean Spray will continue to support initiatives that aim to keep our nation’s bees buzzing.

It’s no question that the English take their gardening seriously. The tradition dates back to the 1st century AD, when the Romans cultivated gardens around villas and palaces. Today, the traditions of gardening and garden tours remain quintessentially English pursuits.

This summer Ocean Spray had the opportunity to share in that rich heritage by constructing a cranberry harvest display for the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, the world’s largest flower show hosted each year by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS).  Founded in 1804, the RHS aims to inspire passion and excellence in the science, art and practice of horticulture.

The Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, hosted each July, features floral marquees, show gardens as well as talks and demonstrations that demonstrate the best in gardening.  

As an exhibitor at the world-class flower show, Ocean Spray recreated the picturesque landscape of a New England cranberry bog. The display showed viewers how cranberries, grown on low creeping shrubs, are harvested by flooding the cranberry beds, creating a crimson tide of berries. Complementing the garden display was a cranberry flower installation, crafted entirely from cranberries, which floated in the Palace Long Water, the central canal overlooking the Hampton Court Palace.  

Adrienne Mollor, a second generation cranberry grower from Massachusetts, provided visitors with insight and behind-the-scenes stories about harvesting cranberries and running a family farm.  Guests of the show were also given the opportunity to put on a pair of waders and experience harvesting first-hand.  

Take a look at the video below to see how Ocean Spray set up the display of millions of cranberries in the Palace Long Water.

At Ocean Spray, few things are more exciting than launching our cranberry products in a new part of the world. In mid-May we officially launched our range of juice drinks in the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco and Egypt.

To celebrate our launch in the region, we hosted a series of events across the region, including a reception at the Dubai Marina Yacht Club featuring a selection of Ocean Spray-inspired cocktails; a sampling event on Dubai’s JBR Walk, a bustling waterfront promenade; and a cranberry cooking class in Lebanon.

Our launch in the Middle East comes at a time of rising juice consumption in the region.  According to Ocean Spray research, regular juice drinkers in Lebanon, UAE and Saudi Arabia are becoming more inclined to drink cranberry juice, with 97% having said they would consider drinking cranberry juice over other flavors.

We look forward to sharing all of the delicious and nutritious benefits of the cranberry with juice drinkers across the Middle East. We think it’s the start of a beautiful friendship.

It may not be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but we’re pretty pleased with the gold medal we helped capture last month for a show garden at Ireland’s largest gardening festival, Bord Bia’s Bloom. The garden, titled “Wellbeing Wetlands, inspired by Ocean Spray from Gardens Now,” was created by master gardeners to help transport the more than 100,000 visitors in Dublin to the iconic scenery of a New England cranberry harvest.

The garden is an example of the ways we love to bring the breath-taking experience of the cranberry harvest to unexpected places. In the past, our bog displays have visited NYC’s Rockefeller Center, DC’s Union Station and even in Vancouver in celebration of the 2010 Olympic Games.

The garden was one of 20 show gardens on display at Phoenix Park in Dublin, and its creators from Gardens Now incorporated no fewer than 50,000 cranberries; 1,500 shrubs, herbaceous plants and grasses; and 20 mature trees.

Stay tuned for more imaginative bog displays this fall as our Bogs Across America campaign kicks off its 10-year anniversary.

We’re excited to announce Ocean Spray has received the President’s “E” Award for Exports. The “E” Awards are the highest recognition any U.S. entity may receive for making a significant contribution to the expansion of U.S. exports. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker presented Ocean Spray’s COO, Ken Romanzi, and Manager of Global Trade Strategies, Lisa Hill, with the award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C on Wednesday, May 28. 

U.S. exports of goods and services hit an all-time record of $2.3 trillion in 2013. Nationally, jobs supported by exports reached more than 11 million last year, up 1.6 million since 2009. Launched earlier this month, NEI/Next, a new phase of President Obama’s National Export Initiative, works to boost economic growth and support additional American jobs by assisting more U.S. companies of all sizes in exporting to more markets across the globe. 

In recognizing Ocean Spray, Secretary Pritzker said, “Ocean Spray Cranberries has demonstrated a sustained commitment to export expansion. The “E” Awards Committee was very impressed with Ocean Spray Cranberries’ creative multi-tiered marketing programs. The company’s work with non-profit organizations and committees dedicated to expanding agricultural exports was also particularly impressive. Ocean Spray Cranberries achievements have undoubtedly contributed to national export expansion efforts that support the U.S. economy and create American jobs. 

President Kennedy revived the World War II “E” symbol of excellence to honor and provide recognition to America's exporters. The “E” Award Program was established by Executive Order 10978 on December 5, 1961. Four years of successive export growth and an applicant’s demonstration of an innovative international marketing plan that led to the increase in exports is a significant factor in making the award. 

U.S. companies are nominated for the “E” Award for Exports through the Department of Commerce’s U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service office network, located within the Department’s International Trade Administration, which has offices in 108 U.S. cities and more than 70 countries to help U.S. exporters.  

A total of 66 U.S. companies were presented with the President’s “E” Award this year. Ocean Spray was honored to be among them.