Cranberries!

Call me old-school but I still love the HBS case on the National Cranberry Cooperative. Apparently, the folks at Fortune, also like old, dated write ups. About once a week, they post a classic article that has some relevance to the time of year or the week’s news.

This week, they get to talking cranberries!

The story (Cape Cod Cranberries) originally appeared in 1946, which, remarkably, makes it older than the HBS case. To connoisseurs of process analysis cases, however, parts will sound familiar:

Regardless of the tricks of weather and the rapacity of bugs, the cranberry harvest–good or bad–begins with the ripening of the Early Blacks, in September, and goes on until the last of the Howes have found their way to the screen house. In the early days “picking time” was a sort of Barnstable County festival, all other work being put aside while people of all ages turned out to gather the crop. Having ridden to the bogs in bright blue wagons piled high with new barrels (modem boxes have since made the cranberry barrel obsolete), almost the entire population of Harwich or Orleans knelt on the vines to pick the berries laboriously by hand. Today the harvesting is done by a smaller horde, mostly Portuguese-Americans, who use wooden-toothed scoops, on an hourly or piecework rate of pay. Recent labor shortages have encouraged the use of a few machine pickers, but these are disliked because of their expense and unreliability, and because they crush an appreciable percentage of the fruit. Regardless of the picking method, numbers of berries drop to the ground under the vines, but a large percentage of these are salvaged by flooding the bogs and floating the loose fruit to the surface. Berries thus gathered are suited only for processing.

Freshly harvested cranberries are at once carted to a so-called screen house, where they are freed from leaves and chaff by a blower, tested for soundness by being dropped on a series of bouncing boards, sifted to eliminate undersized “pieberries,” inspected, and packed for shipment either to the brokers who sell fresh fruit or to the companies that process it.