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What are we going to do come two thousand and two?

by Hal Brown

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Or a product and a jingle like this:
cran_bean_lg.jpg (41294 bytes)

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Cranberry beans
so tangy and tart
the more you eat
the more you fart

Send it in!

. April 20, 1999: If the Cranberry Marketing Committee* is correct with their predictions, come 2002 cranberry growers will produce a total of 6,806,460 bbls of cranberries in the United States and Canada. Demand is estimated to be 5,846,089 bbls. Roughly, that leaves a surplus of a million barrels.

Can the core Ocean Spray consumer be won back? Remember her? She's the lady with a balance in her checkbook who could care less about Fergie or the Tall Ships. She needs product on the shelves and probably likes to use the occasional 50¢ off coupon. If she responds to advertising flacks at all, it is more likely to be a friendly weatherman with a high Q rating than some glamourboy the ad agency pinheads are pushing. And let's not forget the beauty of our red berry. If New England Chronicle has kept airing the harvest footage (some of which was shot on our bogs) for the past four Thanksgivings, and likewise cable's HGTV, there must be something to those pretty pictures.

Can we convince geography challenged twenty-somethings who live west of Albany and south of Baltimore that there's really a juicy wonderland called Nantucket now that Wings is off the air? Maybe we could rename our single serve Nantucket Nectar blends "Catalina Crush" for the west coast.

Is there really a chance to develop new products that will make a dent in the million millennium-plus-two surplus berries? Semi-serious ideas like gum friendly cranberry dental floss sound good on the surface. But, when's the last time you bought a roll of floss? And how many barrels of cranberries do you think it would require to wrap the planet several times around in tart red floss?  Cranberry tea? I suppose it has merits, but why not just brew some tea along with a little cranberry juice? Last I knew, cranberry leaves didn't brew down to much of anything, so what would we do, develop an entire new process to dehydrate berries in order to mix them in with a few other herbs and try to come up with something that tasted halfway decent? Sounds like an expensive proposition for R&D. Just think, Ocean Spray would have to hire tea tasters.

My friend shot some wild geese and found their stomachs were filled with last year's unpicked berries. So maybe a cranberry chickenfeed ingredient is a possibility. We could even fence in some bogs and try raising chickens for meat and eggs and try to sell them by the road: cranberry chickens and cranberry eggs. Could be a low overhead ecologically sound way to make a few bucks and have the fowl gobble up our extra berries. Who knows, maybe the chickens would devour fruitworms and gypsies too. Just think, no more pesticides, plus chickensh-t is probably great fertilizer.  I think I'd actually buy a cranberry chicken.

The ideas can get pretty far afield! How about cranberry Odor Eaters for stinky feet? Or, listen up Monica, cranberry condoms! Maybe urinary tract infections can be prevented from the other direction, so not only condoms, but cranberry Depends for those leaky bladders.

Finally, and last and certainly least, as a special police officer I've come up with this one myself: cranberry coated bullets, then if we ever have to shoot a dangerous trespasser, we can say "how 'bout them cranberries you low-life skel." I hear the growers in Wisconsin and Oregon never go out without their friends from Smith and Wesson, so they should appreciate this.   What can I say? Perhaps this proves how odd and misguided I am.

* Stats & Facts, Special Report, Cranberry Marketing Committee, Wareham, MA,   March 1999, Vol 7, Issue 1

READERS RESPOND TO THIS ESSAY
(from the Cranberry Stressline Forum)
Ilustrations by editor


Hal might be stoned.

Friday, 23-Apr-99 11:19 A.M.

    Cranberry Condoms? Wow, and to think that I was taking this whole thing seriously. The idea was fine, but you went over the top with the picture. Are you smoking Cranberry Dope? Let's try to keep focused and get things fixed.

    1) Saturday, 24-Apr-99 5:03 A.M.

      Yes, we should stay focused, and fix the many problems! However, in these trying times I think a little humor goes a long way. Of course, what is humorous is not always universally seen as being so. Lighten up!

      Maybe you need to take another dose of Cran-Lithium!!  DR

      2) Sunday, 25-Apr-99 06:42 A.M.

      This is only a web page, we can't fix anything here. This is a talking place....like the coffee shop....

       

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