Rubies in the Orchard

Entrepreneur Lynda Resnick’s new book is a compelling read for anyone with a nose for business — or for any reader who’d like to know how a product is brought to market against remarkable odds. Published by Doubleday and available now, we found her first chapter, which follows, a fascinating and candid tale about bringing the best of a little-known fruit with remarkable health benefits into the national retail market. — the editors

From Rubies in the Orchard by Lynda Rae Resnick. © 2009 Lynda Rae Resnick. All rights reserved. Published by Doubleday.

I had hit a personal low. I was out of work for the first time since I was seventeen. I had no job, a blank date book, and so much time on my hands I could lunch with the girls. Sure, I had money. But I was also a bit lost. The kids were grown and living their own lives. Without work, which had been central to my identity and my self-esteem for so many years, I was no longer sure who I was. I had been retired for two months, and already I was panicked. 

My husband, Stewart, who was still very much in the thick of business and suffering none of my existential woes, invited me to attend a business meeting. He wanted me to serve as a sounding board for a new venture we had been working on for years. Maybe I would have something useful to say? Maybe. Maybe not. 

Here was the situation: After having acquired more than 100 acres of mature pomegranate trees in the San Joaquin Valley of California in 1987, Stewart had steadily planted hundreds of acres more throughout the 1990s. Like most crops, pomegranates were basically a commodity, albeit on a much smaller scale. But when the orchards were well managed, pomegranates could produce considerably better returns than the citrus, almonds, and pistachios that occupied most of our acreage. While the market for pomegranates was still tiny, it was growing. 

The meeting wasn’t about marketing pomegranates. It was about creating a market for pomegranate juice. There were several problems that made this unlikely. For starters, only about one in ten Americans said they were familiar with pomegranates, and fewer than half of that group said they had eaten one in the past year. So we weren’t exactly responding to pent-up demand. We were talking about producing juice from a fruit that the overwhelming majority of Americans didn’t know existed. 

But we were responding to something. In 1996, we had begun funding medical research into the health properties of pomegranates, inspired, in part, by centuries of myth and folklore about the pomegranate’s medicinal virtues. For centuries, different parts of the fruit — arils, rind, juice, bark — have been used to treat a wide range of ailments. In his Natural History, written in the first century, Pliny the Elder stated that “the branches of the pomegranate keep away snakes, the little buds . . . neutralize the stings of scorpions, and the fruit is in request for easing the nausea of women with child.” 

The Greek physician 

Dioscorides cited pomegranates as a treatment for ulcers, earaches, and, according to one early, unintentionally comic, translation, “griefs in ye nosthrills.” The  tenth-century Italian physician Shabbetai Donnolo recommended pomegranates not only for earaches but for laryngitis, as well.

Elsewhere, pomegranates were a symbol of fertility and wealth. In the Odyssey, Homer wrote of pomegranates in the gardens of the kings of 

Phrygia and Paecia. Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, adopted the pomegranate as his personal emblem and held one in his left hand as he sat for a 1519 portrait by Albrecht Dürer. Jewish folklore maintains there are 613 luscious ruby arils inside the pomegranate, one for each good deed to be accomplished in a lifetime.

The Koran advises against acting “extravagantly” when the pomegranate has borne fruit. In the Bible, the Song of Solomon identifies love with pomegranates in bloom. But the pomegranate was also used to animate less amorous passions. When Queen Isabella (the troublemaker who started the Inquisition) launched her conquest of the Muslim south of Spain, she vowed to take Andalusia like a ripe pomegranate — “one seed at a time.” 

While the fruit wasn’t well known in the United States, it had clearly cut an impressive swath across much of the world, establishing an honored place in cultures as far away as India and China. We figured you didn’t get a reputation like that — across different eras, lands, and cultures — unless there was at least a little bit of truth to the stories. Still, we had no idea what this bundle of myth, superstition, genuine folk medicine, and ancient wisdom would yield in terms of real health benefits. Was there anything here that could be documented by real science? 

The early research, conducted at UCLA, UC Davis, Rutgers, the Technion Institute in Israel, and other leading institutions, was jaw-dropping. Among the first findings: Pomegranate juice inhibits inflammation and pain. In addition, pomegranates turn out to be astonishingly rich in antioxidants, which inhibit oxidation in the body that can damage cells. Indeed, pomegranates are significantly richer in antioxidants than red wine, green tea, or just about anything else known to humankind. In addition, the fruit was shown to reduce arterial plaque and factors leading to atherosclerosis. Subsequent studies suggested that pomegranates have a powerful effect against prostate cancer. 

In short, the news on the health benefits of pomegranates started off great. Then it proceeded to get better and then astound. One glitch: To get the full health benefits of this magnanimous fruit, you would have to eat it virtually by the pound — consuming two and a half whole pomegranates per day. Pomegranates are hard to open, and when they splatter — well, who has that many raincoats? It was all too impractical. Despite the emerging profile of the pomegranate as nature’s great gift, folks would never be able to consume enough of them to get a daily dose. Unless, of course, they consumed pomegranates in the form of a juice. This might sound like a reasonable solution, but trying to get consistent, high-quality juice from a pomegranate crop is not easy.

We grow the Wonderful variety of pomegranates. When you combine Wonderfuls with the soil and climate of the San Joaquin Valley, you produce the tastiest, sweetest pomegranates in the world. But even under these ideal conditions, pomegranates are fickle. They have to be coaxed off the vine by hand. If the fruit is squeezed too hard, extracting the maximum juice, it bites back — producing a harsh, bitter aftertaste. If you don’t squeeze enough juice, well, you’ll pretty quickly go broke.

We literally spent years experimenting with juicers and applications. Eventually, we had to invent our own pressing technology. Then we had to figure out how to feed the presses more than a million pieces of fruit each day, which required a maze of conveyors and elevators operating with all the precision of a Broadway chorus line.

Even now, there are significant variations in sugar and acidity from one year’s pomegranate crop to the next, and they even differ from orchard to orchard. Each season, we recalibrate the entire juicing process to accommodate the mood of the latest harvest. 

I remember walking the orchards one hot afternoon in early fall. Using a jerry-rigged champagne press right there in the field, one of the farmers made a batch of fresh juice for me. When it’s done right, pomegranate juice produces not merely a specific taste but a full sensory explosion in the mouth. It’s tart yet sweet, heady with a robust, complex mouth feel. It has more in common with a fine Burgundy than with lesser juices like grape, pear, or apple.

The foundation of the juice business is essentially waste management. (It’s a lovely turn of phrase — makes you want to toast your health.) In practice, it makes a virtue of necessity. When grapes or apples are grown, for instance, there are always those unfortunate little specimens that just aren’t pretty enough to pass the fresh-fruit threshold. What do you do with them? Squeeze them. Under that slightly bruised, discolored apple skin may be the sweetest, most delicious fruit of the tree. In the spirit of making lemonade from lemons, growers manage their unsightly “waste” by transforming 

it into juice.

In the cluttered chaos of Stewart’s conference room, the window ledges and conference table were strewn with various juice bottles, nearly three dozen in all, each labeled with its generally dubious contents. Around the long wooden table was a collection of cheerless marketing consultants and somber executives who no doubt wondered what I was doing in their midst. I had run into similar gentlemen (there was not a dame among them) in the past. I was familiar with their marketing gospel and commandments, their “thou musts” and “thou shalt nots.”

The marketing gurus understood the challenge. In addition to the fact that few Americans had ever heard of a pomegranate, the fruit has a truncated harvest season (it begins in October and lasts less than three months) and a high retail price. A complicating factor was presumed to be a massive overproduction problem stemming from all the acreage my “crazy” husband had planted.

The team leader began with the confidence of a man who knows the one true path. “We will mix pomegranate juice with filler juices like white grape and pear and compete with those juices in the  ‘shelf-stable’ aisles of the supermarket,” he announced in what sounded to me like a eulogy for our unlaunched product. Visions of hideous, gasoline-type plastic jugs danced in my head.

He had already figured out the appropriate juice mix, saying “We won’t be able to use more than ten percent pomegranate juice because it is too expensive. More would throw us out of our competitive advantage.” I believe at this point I started to squirm. 

The mention of “competitive advantage” was required by the setting. After all, we were contemplating launching a business. Without competitive advantage, there’s no business. But pomegranate juice has only two such advantages, and they’re very distinct. The first is its sensuous taste; the second, its remarkable health benefits. It seemed the plan was to dilute each of these powerful advantages by a full 90 percent. He was proposing to load diluted, adulterated pomegranate juice onto the nation’s supermarket shelves next to similarly adulterated junk juice and simply hope for the best. While this well-meaning expert droned on, I imagined walking up the supermarket aisle in a rolling sea of red — from Hi-C to Welch’s. The only way to stand out in that crowd would be to color our juice DayGlo lime — except Gatorade had already done that.

Summoning an inner strength usually reserved for saying “no” to pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, I held my tongue through a couple hours of strategic marketing jargon as these gurus extolled the benefits of adding still more volume to the supermarket’s red sea, despite an already perilously high tide. Then the tasting began.

Much of what America consumes when it buys prepackaged juices has misleading messaging. If the package says “Cranberry-Grape 100% Juice,” chances are it’s loaded with a little cranberry and lots of grape, pear, apple, and other content chosen solely for economy’s sake. If the label says something like  “Cranberry-Raspberry Drink,” you might as well just pour yourself a  Coca-Cola, because the main ingredients are almost certainly water and  high-fructose corn syrup — a ubiquitous recipe that has done much to advance the cause of obesity over the past three decades. 

Some people can sing. Some can draw. I can taste. I mean really taste. Stewart used to show me off at wine tastings, where, blindfolded, I could name the wine I was drinking and the year it was produced. I never imagined there would be a payoff to this particular talent — beyond the amusement of my husband and a few friends. My memory of that delicious taste of pomegranate juice in the orchard was still very fresh in my mind; I knew what pomegranate juice should taste like. The various forms of pomegranate pretenders that crossed my palate during this meeting could not have been more of an affront to that memory. 

Various concoctions were pushed across the table, but their basic composition was the same: 10 percent pomegranate juice, 80 percent filler juices, and a 10 percent bonus of exotic flavoring. These included watermelon (delicious if you like Kool-Aid), lemon-lime (gag me), Hawaiian Tropical (whatever that means); they ran the dreadful gamut of phony fruit flavorings common in cheap candy and awful soda. The presentation proceeded with all the excitement of a chemistry final. 

It was not my intention to insult the marketing team. And I doubt, given their supreme confidence, that I could have insulted them even if I had wanted to. But like most people in business, I had been in these types of meetings before, and I have seen people hold their tongues because they were intimidated by know-it-alls holding forth, because they didn’t feel confident enough to challenge them or comfortable enough to upset the apple juice cart. 

But I also knew that Stewart would soon turn to me and pose a question. And when he did, I told him the truth. 

“What do you think?” he asked. 

“I think you’re crazy,” I said. 

“Yeah, I know,” he countered. “But what about the pomegranate marketing strategy?” 

There are always several different ways to make the same point. Whether the discussion is corporate or marital (or in this case a little of both), it’s usually better to take a delicate path, one of constructive criticism delivered in a polite, gentle, and supportive framework. Someday, I promise, I will honor that universal truth. On this day, I dropped the velvet glove and picked up the sledgehammer. 

“It’s wrong,” I said. “Just plain wrong.” 

“This is the real deal,” I said to Stewart, “a gift from God — perhaps the healthiest natural product on the planet. If you water it down with filler juices, you water down its effectiveness. And if you do that, what do you have left?” 

This was greeted with the raised eyebrows and sideways glances that welcome the loud and inebriated to an art lecture. The marketing team was not amused, but I had been asked to give my opinion, and I was not going to coat it in sugar — or corn syrup. Sometimes I think I know something and feel an annoying little quiver in my gut that tells me that maybe it isn’t so. This was not one of those times. Despite all the challenges involved in creating this product — and at this point, I knew only a fraction of them — I wasn’t burdened by self-doubt. My confidence never wavered. Why? Because I knew these were rubies in the orchard; pomegranates had real value. 

Pure and unadulterated, this juice was not only delicious; it had the power to help heal people. It was health in a bottle. People needed pomegranate juice in their lives (even if they didn’t know it yet), and I knew they would pay what it was worth. 

Of course, there would be marketing challenges; but marketing is all about overcoming those challenges. If you have a product with intrinsic value, you can find a way to prevail. Besides, the fact that Starbucks could charge nearly $4.00 for a latte bolstered my resolve. A daily dose of pomegranate juice would cost less than that — and instead of giving you the three o’clock jitters, it would give you health. 

“We know that pomegranates are very expensive to grow and harvest, and we know that hardly anyone knows what a pomegranate is,” I agreed. “But I don’t consider those reasons to go the way of all packaged goods. I see those reasons as the inspiration to create a new category of food.” 

I wrote POM on a piece of paper and passed it to Stewart. “Here is the name of your product. The heart will immediately tell them it’s heart-healthy. We’ll sell it in the refrigerated section of the produce department, and I’ll design a bottle for you that will embody the spirit of this new food category.” 

I had made my case. It was time to sit back and wait for the usual chorus of naysaying to begin. I wasn’t disappointed. Although, in the end, it was less a chorus and more like variations on the theme of Mission: Impossible. The meeting ended inconclusively, with the various junk-juice concoctions still littered about the room. 

That evening, Stewart told me he understood what I had been saying in the conference room. What’s more, he was willing to believe it might work. Then, with the same tone he uses when he asks, “What’s for dinner?” he said, “Why don’t you take over the business? You seem to have a vision for it.” 

When will I learn to keep my mouth shut? 

I have always been the marketer in the family. Stewart runs the shop, figures out the financing and margins, and hires the core executive team. I work on building the brands. A few people have very kindly called me a marketing genius. Naturally, I never tire of hearing that, but it isn’t true. 

I know what and who I am — and I am not a genius. I am, however, smart, disciplined, and hardworking. So far, that has proved to be enough to create a life in marketing that has often been thrilling. I have learned over and over, however, that good marketing for bad products inevitably leads to a dead end. I have been down that road myself, and I’ve watched others travel it. But I’ve also seen good products languish because they were poorly positioned, misunderstood by the very people responsible for promoting them. 

For me, every marketing campaign begins with the same question: What is the intrinsic value of the product or service? When I talk about “rubies in the orchard,” that’s what I mean. Where does the value reside? And how can we coax it out and communicate it to consumers in a creative and cost-effective way? 

Before you are able to convince consumers of the value of something, you have to be able to convince yourself. If it’s not immediately apparent to you, it won’t be to them either. That’s where research comes in. Before we squeezed our first pomegranate into a bottle, I wanted to know everything there was to know about this fruit — and then some. I studied scientific data and interviewed doctors who were conducting tests. I delved into history, art, and literature. And I ate more pomegranates in more ways than you can imagine. 

It wasn’t enough for me to be passionate about the product I intended to bring to market. Just because you own a company (or an idea) doesn’t mean your colleagues or employees (or spouse!) will follow you blindly into the marketplace. You must market ideas to your team before you can market them to the public. A lack of faith is deadly. Everyone needs to be a believer. 

For me, the hardest sell is usually Stewart. He always plays devil’s advocate against both sides of every argument. Grrrr! But in the case of 100 percent pure pomegranate juice, he saw the same great promise I did and was onboard from the start. My first COO, however, wasn’t quite so enthused. He was extremely capable and uniquely qualified to run the business with me, but he spent the better portion of his working day hunched over his computer, analyzing financial models that proved beyond doubt that there was just no way this juice business was going to work. 

Business is often viewed as the realm of science and industry, of logistics, numbers, and cold, hard, irreducible facts. But like every other part of life, it’s also a matter of faith. We see the proof of this every day, all around us. Talented people who lack faith in themselves or their mission fail, while people with less talent and more faith succeed. Bill Gates turned his back on a bright future the day he dropped out of Harvard. Ted Turner borrowed irresponsibly to buy the underperforming Atlanta television station that he built into CNN. 

We all know these as great business stories. But more often, they’re not business stories at all. That college dropout from Seattle didn’t have a business. He had faith. The cowboy entrepreneur with a plan for a 24-hour news channel didn’t have a financial plan that any sober executive would find compelling (his competitors thought it was a joke). What he had was faith. 

Building brands is, first and foremost, not about numbers. It is about value and people. If, on the marketing side, you have people with faith in the value of the brand, you can communicate and extend that faith to consumers. If even a small core of consumers begins to have faith in your product, you’ve got the building blocks of a winner. 

In the beginning, I was having a hard time building a team and getting the business off the ground. Without the COO’s emotional investment in the project, it was hard to get emotional investment from others. Every time we tried to take flight, something, some nagging doubt, some form of disbelief, would drag us back down to Earth. 

We had so many other hurdles to overcome — operations problems, computer issues, and, two years running, a smaller crop than we had anticipated. (Demand outdistanced our supply by 300 percent, which may sound like good news, but, I can assure you, it was not.) 

 Gaining traction for a new brand is hard enough under the best circumstances. Without the level of emotional investment you get when people really believe in something, it’s just about impossible. So before you spend a nickel to convince a consumer of anything, make sure you’ve convinced yourself and the people in your own office. 

A month after that meeting in the conference room, as I prepared to show my marketing plan to Stewart and his sales force, I still had faith, although the facts of my particular situation were not all that encouraging. I was driving my brilliant designer, Bryan Honkawa, crazy. 

I wanted something that would make POM’s bottle as distinctive as its content. I didn’t know what it was, but I was pretty sure I would recognize it when I saw it. 

Knowing how important it was to me, Bryan was in the process of producing about 100 different designs, hoping one of them would be “it.” 

There are many points in business when you need to compromise — either with your colleagues or with a stubborn reality. There are also a few areas that are so critically important that compromise is fatal. To me, the design of the POM bottle belonged in the latter category. 

Why did the POM bottle have to stand out? If you’ve ever walked the aisles of a supermarket, you already know the answer. The run-of-the-mill American supermarket is 50,000 square feet of visual noise featuring nearly 50,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) — about one SKU for every square foot. It’s an eye-popping cacophony of bold, bright colors and logos — all screaming for attention. Junk cereals and snack foods clamor to catch your child’s wandering eye. Soft drinks scream out in bold reds, blazing oranges, and bright greens, high-fructose heralds of the artificially sweet life. 

Many of these products benefit from marketing budgets in the tens of millions. How could we compete with them and distinguish our product from theirs if we all looked alike and they had all the advertising money? We couldn’t. 

We had come this far by focusing on the fundamentals, going deeper and deeper inside our product to understand its intrinsic value. Everything we needed to know was there inside the pomegranate. We had to resist the temptation to “think outside the box.” 

I know that’s become a fashionable cliché in recent years, but it’s just about always wrong. The answers are not outside the box — they’re inside. They’re inherent in whatever task you’ve undertaken, whatever product you want to market. 

When I walked in to review the bottle designs, the answer was immediately apparent. It was so obvious, in fact, that I would have had the same instant response if Bryan had offered me 10,000 designs to choose from. The solution, of course, was fundamental, intrinsic to the pomegranate itself, inherent in the product we were bringing to market. Among the many choices was a shape that resembled one pomegranate on top of another. The bottle was derived from the juice’s natural container. How perfect. 

There was just one little problem. Every packaging engineer said this bottle couldn’t be manufactured in plastic (our first choice) and it was near to impossible in glass. Sure, an artisan glassblower could easily make one, but we needed millions. Bottle manufacturers are used to creating simple, cylindrical shapes at very high speeds. Shaping molten glass into a delicate pomegranate crown while spitting out thousands of units per minute simply wasn’t in their repertoire. 

The unique shape of the POM bottle also made printing on it difficult. It took a number of painful adjustments to figure that one out. Finally, filling the bottles with juice in a high-speed filling facility proved to be a shattering experience — a bit like industrialized bumper cars. Bottles constantly collided. With typical, straight-walled bottles, this bumping isn’t a big deal. We solved the problem of our crashing bottles by creating a barely perceptible straight edge on the outside of each sphere. 

At each hurdle, it might have made sense to throw up our hands, admit defeat, and do what so many experts were telling us to do: Get a normal bottle. The only catch to that “follow the rule” consensus was that we weren’t going to spend tens of millions of dollars to market our product. That beautiful, distinct bottle was going to have to carry part of the marketing load. It was integral to the product and too important to the brand to simply let it go. 

We climbed — and sometimes crawled — over the obstacles. When I finally made my presentation to Stewart and his group, the marketing gang had the gung ho spirit of children forced to eat Brussels sprouts. 

• “No one will ever pay $3.50 for a bottle of juice.” 

• “No one wants a glass bottle.” 

• “Men won’t buy POM with a heart on it.” 

Oh, well. At least Stewart continued to stand by my vision. We may have been sailing on a sea of doubt, but there was still plenty of faith aboard ship.

[Editor’s note: This concludes the first chapter of Rubies in the Orchard. In the remaining nine chapters, Resnick discusses the challenges of bringing a new product to a cynical consumer market.]

LYNDA RESNICK brought POM Wonderful to consumers. She also made FIJI Water the largest imported bottled-water product sold in the U.S.