"The Raisin Situation"

From the New York Times, April 27, 2019:

One man wanted to change the raisin industry for the better. He got more than he bargained for.

FRESNO, Calif. — Millennials just weren’t eating raisins. So Sun-Maid, the century-old company with the iconic little red raisin boxes, hired someone to convince them that they should.

At 38, Harry Overly was decades younger than the tenured raisin man he replaced as the chief executive of Sun-Maid. But he had experience — as the North American head of the company that makes Bertolli olive oil, and in marketing roles at Wrigley and other food companies. He seemed suited to the job.

When he came west, though, he was taken aback by the level of animosity he encountered in the U.S. raisin industry, the entirety of which is crammed into a few hundred square miles in California’s Central Valley. 

Three months into his tenure, which began on Halloween of 2017, Mr. Overly attended a meeting of some raisin industry players in the back room of a restaurant in Fresno, Calif. This introduction left him shaken. “I’m not saying this lightly, because — you can read about this in different spots — people kind of think there’s this raisin mafia out there and that kind of stuff,” Mr. Overly said. 

He said that he asked the group how they thought they could work together. “And the answer I got back was nothing short of collusion,” he said. While no one was proposing they take action, the anti-competitive tactics discussed in that back room, he said, were “completely illegal.”

As he tried to make changes in the raisin industry and at his own company, Mr. Overly said he faced intimidation, harassing phone calls and multiple death threats. With his spouse in the last trimester of a pregnancy, Mr. Overly found a note shoved into a crack of his front door that warned: “you can’t run.”

Mr. Overly installed a security system at his house in Fresno. At Sun-Maid headquarters, he and other executives discussed the necessity of active shooter trainings. As rumors about Mr. Overly’s motives swirled among raisin farmers, raisin packers and raisin bureaucrats, he became increasingly concerned about the safety of the raisins themselves. He feared that the current crop, drying from grapes to a wrinkly, shrunken state in bins on the Sun-Maid campus, would be set ablaze. It was their destruction by “fire, specifically,” that worried him, he said.

“What I figured out fast was that this was not an industry which was interested in figuring out how you grow the size of the pie,” he said. “It is one where they figure out how they just steal different slices of the pie from each other.”

The world's largest raisin box at the Sun-Maid headquarters in Kingsburg, Calif.

Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times 

The Dancing of the Raisins

It makes sense that Sun-Maid and its competitors in the raisin sector, all working and living in the same water-hungry valley, might not be the best of friends. But the American raisin industry, which is estimated to be worth about $500 million, is particularly fractious. Other groups of farmers also band together to set prices; while raisin growers do that, they do not tend to cooperate on much else. That includes a reluctance to work together on raisin advertising, which is especially strange given that the raisin industry commissioned and paid for one of the world’s most recognizable advertising campaigns.

The first California Dancing Raisins commercial debuted on television in the fall of 1986. You may recall the ad with their version of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” These anthropomorphic raisins, conceived as an R&B group in the Motown mold, were some of the first animated characters created with Claymation. 

Seth Werner, the copywriter at the San Francisco agency Foote, Cone & Belding who created the concept, knew the spots were outrageously popular. He got a call from Paul McCartney’s assistant, asking for a taped copy of the ad so the Beatle could watch it on repeat. Nancy Reagan invited the raisins to the White House in 1988 for Christmas. Michael Jackson requested that he personally be raisinified by the inventor of Claymation, Will Vinton, for a raisin commercial that appeared in movie theaters. (“It was really quite a problem getting the character of the Michael Jackson raisin to be good enough for Michael to approve,” Mr. Werner said. He remembered that Mr. Vinton told him “‘Finally I put Janet’s nose on him and he loved it,’” referring to Mr. Jackson’s sister.)

Raisin sales spiked. But success bred discontent. Even as Sun-Maid benefited disproportionately from the ads as the biggest brand in town, Barry Kriebel, then the company’s president, worked to limit his competitors from profiting in the same manner. He was dead set on restricting the way that the dancing raisin was displayed on the packaging of other brands — and Sun-Maid, which now represents about 40 percent of the industry, was big enough to put the pressure on.

Barry Kriebel “and I fought like cats and dogs,” said Kalem Barserian, 81, the leader of the Raisin Bargaining Association, which represents raisin farmers as they negotiate prices with raisin processors, including Sun-Maid. (Mr. Barserian has known five different Sun-Maid chiefs — and has a long tenure as one of the most formidable men in Fresno.)....

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