Cranberries: A Fine, Finicky Fruit

Geography in the News is an educational series offered by the American Association of Geographers for teachers and students in all subjects. We include vocabulary, discussion, and assignment ideas at the end of each article. 

Cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) are a big part of the winter holidays. Native to North America, they grow in bogs and wet areas from New England to the upper Midwest and Canada. Some also grow in the Appalachian Mountains. A cousin species, V. oxycoccos, grows in Europe.

Cranberry vines grow best in sandy, organic, acidic soils. They prefer cold winters and cool summers. Massachusetts was once the leading producer, but is now outpaced by Wisconsin. Other states where the berry is grown are New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. In Canada, too, cranberry farms are found in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

The vines take at least three years to spread and form a mat before bearing fruit. In September, as berries ripen, the farmers flood their fields and use a thrashing machine to scoop berries from the vines. Once they float to the water’s surface, the berries are collected for market.

Only 5 percent of the berries go to the market fresh. Most are frozen whole, canned, or bottled as juice. Most people buy more cranberry sauce, juice, and even cranberry health supplements than fresh cranberries.

It was not always this way. For centuries, wild-growing cranberries were harvested by the many nations of the Algonquian people who continue to inhabit all of New England and much of the Midwest and Eastern Canada. They call the berry sassamenesh, and harness its power as a superfood. (Cranberries are full of Vitamin C and other nutrients.) One recipe is pemmican, which mixes the berries with dried fish or meat and tallow. Pemmican was the original power bar: it is formed into cakes and baked in the sun. This provides fat, carbs, and nutrients in a form that is easy to carry and store for months.

Demand for Cranberry Grows Fast

For a plant that takes years to bear fruit, the cranberry is otherwise growing fast. Its market expands every year. Cranberries are an important import to other countries, and it is now seen as a food for all year long, particularly for its health benefits. Shoppers have come to expect dried and fresh cranberries in many products, from baked goods to cereal to energy bars. This expansion was driven by a shrewd international marketing strategy from a nearly century-old grower-owned cooperative, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Ocean Spray began as a small farmers’ cooperative in 1930. By 1988, the company controlled 85 percent of the world’s cranberry market. The key to their success was smart decisions in both marketing and production. Ever eat a “craisin”? This dried version of the fruit was a snacking breakthrough in 1981. By then, Ocean Spray was already famous for its juices. Soon, it was putting cranberries in cereals, energy bars, and desserts.

As demand for cranberries shot upward, competitors got into the game. Private companies made high offers to farmers, hoping to lure them from Ocean Spray. Still, Ocean Spray remains the dominant player, and certainly the most recognizable in the grocery store. It represents about 700 family-owned cranberry farms.

America’s cranberry farmers produce about 8 billion barrels a year. Most come from Wisconsin, which had one of its strongest harvests yet in 2024. It’s almost the perfect place for these unique berries, with plenty of water, sandy soil, and ideal weather. That doesn’t mean they are always a sure thing, however. There is a margin of risk every year. “I like the challenge,” said John Stauner, owner of James Lake Farms in Wisconsin. “It’s a profession where you have a lot of variability throughout the year.”

The weather has always created uncertainty for farmers. Climate change is adding to their worries. In the past decade, Massachusetts bogs experienced flooding from both ocean saltwater and torrential rain, killing some bogs. On the other extreme, a 2022 drought also took a heavy toll on production.

Cranberry bogs are part of the climate solution in New England, too, at least after they have run their course producing the fruit. Although one in four bogs that have gone out of business in Massachusetts, some farmers are using their land for large-scale restoration to protect wildlife and wetlands in the state.

Some cranberry production has headed overseas since the 1990s. A California company invested $20 million in building cranberry bogs in Chile. The investment has made Chile the third biggest cranberry producer worldwide. The United States remains the world’s top producer.

Some years ago, the geospatial firm Descartes Labs used radar data and algorithmic machine learning to map America’s cranberry bogs. It wasn’t easy: find out how they did it.

The next time someone passes the cranberry sauce or offers you a glass of cranberry juice, tell them a thing or two about this bright berry’s history, geography, growth habits, and economic value.

And that is Geography in the News, updated November 1, 2024.

Material in this article comes from “Cranberries” (1996), an original article for Geography in the News by Neal Lineback, Appalachian State University.

AAG’s Geography in the News is inspired by the series of the same name founded by Neal Lineback, professor and the chair of Appalachian State University’s Department of Geography and Planning. For nearly 30 years from 1986 to 2013, GITN delivered timely explainer articles to educators and students, relevant to topics in the news. Many of these were published on Maps.com’s educational platforms and in National Geographic’s blogs. AAG is pleased to carry on the series.

Sources Consulted for this Article

• Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, Cranberries. April 2024.
• Blakely, J., Native fruit: Cranberry for all seasons. The Smithsonian Institution, Unbound, November 14, 2017.
• Borzo, Sherrie, The sucking sound of history: Cranberries. No date.
• Chronicle 5 WCVB, Restoring a cranberry bog to a wetlands habitat. YouTube, 2021.
• Living Observatory, Learning from the restoration of wetlands on cranberry farmlands. December 2020.
• Teirstein, Z. Northeast drought endangers Massachusetts cranberry harvest. September 14, 2022.
• USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Cranberries: No longer just an American tradition, 2016.
• WXPR-Wiconsin, Half-way through harvest, this year’s cranberry crop is looking good for growers. 2024.

Vocabulary and Terms

• Algorithm
• Appalachia, Appalachian mountains
• Bog
• Cooperative
• Machine learning
• Pemmican
• Radar
• Sassmenesh/sasminash
• Tallow

Questions for Discussion and Further Study

1. What kinds of conditions do cranberries need to grow?
   For further study outside of this article: Find out more about the regions and places mentioned in this article. For example, what states make up New England? Do all of them have cranberry bogs? Where are British Columbia and Nova Scotia on a map of Canada? How do we define the Appalachians? How do the climates of these places differ, and how are they similar?
2. What impact has climate change had on cranberry farming? What impacts can old cranberry farms have on climate change and wetlands?
   For further study outside of this article: What approaches are scientists and farmers taking to protect the cranberry farms, or to convert old farms back to wetland habitat? What scientific tools are they using to measure, track, and address changes they observe?
3. The Algonquian peoples were the first to use cranberries for health and energy on long journeys. What were the special, portable cakes they made for this purpose, and what ingredients did they use?
   For further study outside of this article: Find out more about the Algonquian peoples and language groups. What are some of the tribes that speak Algonquian languages (which have different names)? See if you can find out where some of these tribes lived before European colonization, and where they are now. Can you find other food or plant names in Algonquian?