Spreading Sassamanesh

When the Pilgrims first landed, they found the Nauset Indians using a bright red waxy berry that seemed good to eat as well as valuable for making poul tices and preserving game. The Indians called the berry sassamanesh; the Pilgrims rechristened it the cranberry. At first confined to New England, and mainly to Cape Cod, as a diet staple and profitable source of income, the cranberry gradually conquered the holiday tables of the nation. This month, when Americans buy more cranberries than at any other time of the year, no Thanksgiving dinner will be considered complete without them. The most important fact about the $54 million cran berry industry, however, is that its health no longer depends on just the traditional holiday trade; cranberry products have grown into year-round sellers that compete with other foods for everyday use.

Behind this transformation is Ocean Spray of Hanson, Mass., which produces 85% of all the cranberries grown in the world, has annual sales of $46 million. Ocean Spray is a cooperative that distributes its earnings to a pool of 1,000 growers in Massachusetts (where the sandy-bottomed bogs of Cape Cod prove most hospitable to the berry), New Jersey, Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington State. Formed by a series of mergers in 1930, it has taken much of the risk and uncertainty out of cranberry growing, this fall paid growers $13.99 a barrel for the 1.2 million barrels that their bogs produced; at one time, the price was as low as $3 a barrel.

Bogged Down. Ocean Spray grew bigger than any other cranberry cooperative because Founder Marcus Urann, figuring that housewives were tired of stewing fresh cranberries, decided to can some cranberry sauce. Housewives ate it up. Even so, cranberries sold mostly around holidays, and sales grew no faster than the population. The industry suffered its greatest setback in 1959, when the Government seized a few cranberries sprayed with aminotriazole weed killer and announced that cranberries so contaminated might cause cancer. That Thanksgiving and Christmas, and in the months that followed, the public reluctance to buy cranberries almost ruined the industry.

After that debacle, cranberry growers decided that they needed a broader base for their industry, began to push the berries as a year-round dish. Two years ago they hired as Ocean Spray's general manager Edward Gelsthorpe, a sharp product executive with Colgate-Palmolive and a summertime sailor who was attracted by the idea of living year-round on Cape Cod. Gelsthorpe was also attracted by Ocean Spray's possibilities. "It took only superficial analysis," he says, "to realize how little had been done with cranberries."

Going Abroad. Gelsthorpe recruited a few more consumer-product executives, reorganized Ocean Spray's processing plants to save money, put the savings into a $4,000,000 advertising campaign that pushed cranberries as good anytime eating. He had the 4,000 recipes in company files tried out to see which had commercial possibilities. Ocean Spray soon came out with cranapple juice, frozen orange-cranberry juice, a whole range of cranberry-camfruit jellies, and cranberry-orange relish. Tie-ins have added cranberry sauce to Swanson frozen dinners and cranberry muffins to Betty Crocker's ready-mix line. Sophisticated drinkers are trying the Cape Codder (vodka, cranberry juice, a twist of lemon), and Arthur Godfrey, himself a Cape Cod cranberry grower, last week urged his listeners to try cranberry juice in hot tea.

Under Gelsthorpe, 44, Ocean Spray is making grants to agricultural schools to find new strains of cranberries, also supporting medical research to study the berries' beneficial effects. Its cranberry growers, who in the fall must frequently flood their bogs to protect the delicate plants from frost, now use picking machines that take the place of 20 men working with the oldtime hand scoops. Ocean Spray has also turned to exports, now ships its products to 27 nations. Gelsthorpe is concentrating initially on Britain, hoping to show Britons what their ancestors missed by not emigrating with the Pilgrims to the land where sassamanesh grows.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.