Legendary Berries By Jillian Kramer
Pick up any clamshell container of Driscoll’s strawberries, and you’ll notice something: The berries are uniformly crimson red, consistently heart shaped, shiny but not too shiny. In other words, these strawberries look as good as they taste, and that’s by design — literally. The brand’s green logo scrolled on a bright yellow background may be what first catches your eyes, but it’s what’s inside those clear containers — packed full of perfectly colored, similarly shaped and always slightly sweet, genetically ideal (but not GMO) strawberries — that makes you recognize and love Driscoll’s. Randy Benko moved to Watsonville, California, where Driscoll’s is headquartered, in 1963. He began packing baskets of berries into trays for the local farmers who lined the street he lived on, making as much as 15 cents a stack at just 10 years old, he recalls. About the same time, he had the opportunity to visit Driscoll’s distribution center — a family friend had a connection — and he tasted Driscoll’s strawberries for the first time. “Having worked and grown up in Watsonville, I had never seen strawberries that looked like those,” the now director of foodservice customer development for Driscoll’s says. “They were not apple-sized, but they were huge. And the thing that I really remember too, at that very young age, was the flavor of the berries was different. I knew even then that the berries in Driscoll’s boxes were very different than everything else.” 5 8 J U LY A U G U ST 20 20
But what you might not know is Driscoll’s history, a path to those perfect berries that starts well before the World Wars. Today, Driscoll’s is a fourth-generation family business, and its founders J.E. Reiter and R.F. Driscoll, brothers-in-law, started growing strawberries even before the turn of the 19th century in the Pajaro Valley of California, which encompasses Watsonville. In 1904, the duo planted the strawberry that would become known as the Banner strawberry, the family’s first foray into consistently beautiful berries. While other strawberries might be oblong or pale, Banner strawberries were rotund and vibrant. The pair exclusively sold Banner strawberries for more than 10 years, until other farmers figured out the formula, so to speak, and grew them too. By the 1940s, Driscoll’s sons, Ned and Donald Driscoll, and their cousin, Joe Reiter, joined with Kenneth Sheehy, T.B. Porter and M.W. Johnson to found The Strawberry Institute, dedicated to researching and breeding superior varieties of strawberries. By 1950, the group formed Driscoll Strawberry Associates, Inc., or Driscoll’s, and in 1958 released the Z5A strawberry, its first proprietary cultivar — so ideal in its visage, flavor and transportability it boosted the brand to national recognition. (In Quest for the Perfect Strawberry:
