Marcus Libby Urann was born in 1873. Before he would become known as “Mr. Cranberry,” he was captain of the University of Maine’s 1893 football team, one of the founders of Phi Kappa Phi honorary fraternity, and a lawyer.
Urann left the law to buy a cranberry bog, later explaining, “I felt I could do something for New England. You know, everything in life is what you do for others.” Aside from Urann’s altruism, he was also a savvy businessman who knew how to work a market. Urann’s canned cranberry sauce and juice were revolutionary innovations because they produced a product with a shelf life of many months from a product that had to be consumed in days.
Native Americans were the first to cultivate the cranberry in North America, but the berries weren’t marketed and sold commercially until the middle of the 18th century. Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall has been credited with planting the first-known commercial cranberry bed in Dennis, Massachusetts in 1816, but Sir Joseph Banks was harvesting cranberries in Britain a decade earlier from seeds that were imported from the United States. Banks had not marketed them. By the mid-19th century, the modern cranberry industry was in full swing with fierce competition among bog growers.
Initially the business model worked on a small scale: families and members of the community harvested wild cranberries and sold them locally or to a middleman before retail. The market expanded to larger cities like Boston, Providence, and New York, relying on cheap labor from migrant workers. Farmers competed to unload their surpluses.
The cranberry market did not explode due to a combination of geography and economics. Cranberries require a particular climate for a successful crop: they are grown in natural wetlands and require a lot of water, then a period of dormancy during long, cold winter months. Therefore they were localized to areas like Massachusetts and Wisconsin.
Urann’s idea to can and juice cranberries in 1912 created a market that cranberry growers had never seen. In the 1930s, harvesting techniques transitioned from “dry” to “wet,” from picking the cranberries from the vine by hand (dry) to flooding the bog at time of harvest (wet, like seen in Ocean Spray commercials). Today, about 90 percent of cranberries are picked using wet harvesting techniques. The water helps to separate the berry from the vine. Small air pockets in the berries allow the berries to float to the surface. Rather than harvesting in a week, wet techniques allow a harvest in an afternoon. After wet harvesting techniques were introduced, growers sought new methods of using their crop, including canning, freezing, drying, and juicing berries.
Urann develop several novel cranberry products in addition to the cranberry sauce log, such as the cranberry juice cocktail in 1933, and a cranberry syrup for mixed drinks in 1933.
Federal regulations stood in the way of Urann cornering the cranberry market. Urann had seen other industries fall under scrutiny for violating antitrust laws such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Clayton Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act.
In 1930, Urann convinced his competitors – John C. Makepeace of the AD Makepeace Company (the nation’s largest grower at the time) and Elizabeth F. Lee of New Jersey-based Cranberry Products Company – to join forces under a cooperative, named Cranberry Canners, Inc. The cooperative, designed to shield from risks associated with the crop’s price and volume instability, would have been illegal had attorney John Quarles not found an exemption for agricultural cooperatives in the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922, which gave “associations” making agricultural products limited exemptions from anti-trust laws.
When the Ocean Spray name was initially adopted for the cooperative in 1957, Urann had “borrowed” the name from a fish company in Washington State from which he later bought the rights. Urann explained that the cooperative structure worked because of “grower control [which] means ‘self control’ to maintain the lowest possible price to consumers.” The relationship between Urann, Makepeace, and Lee was fraught with mistrust, but operating on the principle that one should keep one’s enemies closer than one’s friends, the cooperative rationalized production, distribution, quality control, marketing, and pricing.
Urann’s nephew, Marcus M. Urann, also became a cranberry executive. Urann died in 1963.
Ocean Spray is still a cooperative of 600 independent growers across the United States that work together to set prices and standards.
This year, when you pass around the can-shaped jellied cranberry sauce, remember to thank Urann for revolutionizing the industry.