Pursuit Of Flavor

Fred Cook: To grow plants, to produce fruit is really, really hard. You just have to be very steady. It's kind of like a compass needle, you start thinking about going north rather than a quick win. You realize that these wins are going to be slow and take time. And I think that's true with just about everything that we do, really, because it's the same sort of thing. You have to kind of steadily work at it if you want to improve and don't expect something in a month. Give yourself years maybe, or decades even. It's really about seeing hidden potential. And that's the story of the raspberry.

I'm Fred Cook and I am a Director at R&D at Driscoll's Research and Development. It's all very natural what we do. It's all old fashioned, it's plant breeding, like people did with wheat 2000 years ago, it's the same thing. Hey, good mom, hey, good dad, wow, let's put them together, see what happens. That's what we do.

I think raspberries were just not available to people 50 years ago, not in general. The wild raspberries would grow in these big bushes and they produce a few berries just for a month in the summer and that would be it, that's all you'd get. So they were precious little things and you had to live near a bush to have a shot at them.

It was such a contrast to the situation with strawberries, where the Driscoll and Reiter families had successfully brought to market in the early 20th century. The families saw an opportunity here to do something no one else was doing. And they began breeding raspberries on a small Santa Clara Valley farm in 1937. But progress with raspberries doesn't come fast. After 20 years or so of breeding, they put an end to the program. They just weren't seeing the progress needed to make the cost and effort worthwhile.

There was a house and it had a few raspberries in the yard for many, many years, and then some time in the 1970s one of those varieties was resurrected from the yard, multiplied, and started an industry.

It was like a needle in a haystack. No one knew it at the time but this raspberry would change everything. Miles (Reiter) had the vision to go through failure after failure after failure because he really believed that this thing would be a big deal some day and be commercial and he really believed in the raspberry.

Well, it was many years ago. It was 1999, there were four of us at that time that were working in R&D, in breeding raspberries. And we were a pretty focused small group. At that point I was actually looking at how resistant to mold post-harvest that these things would be because that's a big deal. And so I put berries in these clam shells and store them at room temperature for a couple of days and they would be very fuzzy at the end of two days. Well this one, this guy just didn't get moldy, it was amazing. And that really made shipping possible, it made a bigger market possible, it really broke raspberries wide open.

Yeah, it became Maravilla – that was its name. I remember it really well, we were walking down a field, it's a quarter mile from here, I was referencing the mold testing, and just saying, "This thing just doesn't mold. It's like the mold spores just bounce off." And he said, "Yeah, it's kind of like the bracelets of Wonder Woman." And so we named it Wonder Woman. But when we went to patent it, you can't patent Wonder Woman, it's all owned. And so, we used the Spanish, which is Mujer Maravilla. So that was how Maravilla got her name.

What have I learned from raspberries? I guess, persistence in a way. Like plant breeding, again, it just takes so much time and you just have to be willing to go back and go back and go back and just be steady. The potential is kind of enormous, actually. I mean, that's part of what makes this fun too, is you just don't know what's around the next corner.