On speculation and controversy 7/22/99 Cranberry Stressline has devoted a fair amount of space to speculating about which corporations might be exploring the possibility of acquiring Ocean Spray, and which might benefit from owning the name in cranberries. There are clearly two routes that the cooperative can take to pull itself, and the cranberry industry on its coat tails (like the "in good old days"), out of the red ink and back into the glory of those red berries at harvest time. One is a drastic restructuring based on smart, not necessarily expensive, strategic planning. And the other is being bought out by a much larger company which will do the same, only with much deeper pockets. Regardless of who does it, the cranberry industry, not just Ocean Spray, must be saved. This will mean long range planning for international marketing. Do we even know who in the world will like the taste of cranberries? Brits love the taste of currants, but Cran-currant never caught on here. Try to find pure currant juice in the average size supermarket in the United States. No amount of clever advertising will sell cranberries to a population that simply doesn't like the taste. But find a few countries where they just love the stuff, promote it properly, and even with Canada and Chile, the industry won't be able to produce enough to meet the world demand. The internecine warfare between Ocean Spray and the independents has taken its toll. Surely, business is business, and the independents saw their opportunity with the 100% juice ploy, and took it. Apple and Eve is jumping on late. The numbers aren't clear yet, but Ocean Spray may have slipped again by not bringing out a calcium fortified line sooner. The news, such as it is, from inside cooperative headquarters does not seem to be good. Morale is reported to be low. The continued presence of a failed CEO in an apparent leadership role does not suggest a commitment to significant change. The explanation that Tom Bullock's guidance is needed to assist during a transition rings hollow. It also shows that despite posturing, the Board lacks confidence in itself and the top consultants they've retained. CEOs are fired outright, they clean their desks and depart post haste, and change is made to happen by leaders and experts who know what they're doing. Waiting in the wings, without a doubt, are corporations interested enough in purchasing Ocean Spray to do at the least, initial research into whether an acquisition would be in their best interest. I've already suggested that one of the big three beverage companies, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, or Cadbury-Schweppes, could make a splash on the fruit juice aisle by owning Ocean Spray. Huge multiproduct companies like Unilever, Nestle, Kraft Foods or Proctor & Gamble could, for all intents and purposes, buy Ocean Spray out of petty cash and stake out a valuable stretch of the juice aisle.
Ocean Spray can go it alone. But only if the handful of individuals who now control the destiny of the cooperative put their egos aside and stop being paranoid about the independents. The company is not being run by a Board of Directors of twenty-five grower/ owners. It is being run by certain individuals among those twenty-five, and several members of management, who have, by dint of varying degrees of ambition, drive, leadership, intimidation and, certainly, intelligence, influenced others to go along with their decisions. The controversial role of Cranberry Stressline, which includes your role as participants in the Forum and Op-Ed Columns as well as mine in searching the web for information and offering the occasional opinion myself, is to hold the Board accountable to the grower / owners and to the sometimes overlooked employees on the cooperative's payroll. It can only do this by being public. If mistakes in judgement are made, the management and the Board must know that they will be judged not just in controlled and secret Advisory meetings, and in gripe sessions in the donut shop, but in the court of industry opinion. Ask yourself: how many times has your Advisory Committee "advised" and how many times has this advice been followed? The numbers of readers of Cranberry Stressline who don't work directly in the Cranberry Industry is relatively small, but it is not how many such readers there are, but who these readers are. Bankers, advertising executives, brokers, lawyers, public relations professionals, management consultants, beverage industry analysts, reporters, government officials, and executives from corporations all log on to Cranberry Stressline to see what is happening in the cranberry industry. Management and the Board certainly have made it clear that they both know this and that they disapprove of making information so readily available to these professionals. But that is exactly why Cranberry Stressline has the potential to influence decision making, much in the way getting your Letter to the Editor published in a newspaper does.
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Another possibility, so far overlooked on Stressline, is that a smaller food and beverage
company seeking to diversify, could do so with Ocean Spray. For example,