In Watsonville, California, the story begins with a strawberry farm small enough to fit inside a much older idea of American agriculture: plant, harvest, sell locally, and do it again next season. The farm was founded in 1904, when two brothers-in-law started what would become Driscoll’s.
The berries did not stay local. A crop that once appeared mostly within a narrow harvest window became a grocery-store regular, helped along by production in different growing regions and by a company willing to treat the fruit as a branded product rather than a generic red package. The Business Times describes Driscoll’s as part of the machinery that made berries available in every season.
From Watsonville to the Produce Aisle
The scale is now difficult to picture from the original farm. Driscoll’s controls about one-third of the U.S. berry market and supplies more than 20 countries, according to the company’s history as reported by Entrepreneur. That reach depends on a network larger than the land the company owns: growers, breeding programs, shippers, retailers, and the quiet choreography required to move fragile fruit before it turns into compost.
For growers, the important shift is not simply that more berries are being sold. It is that the market has become more particular. A berry must arrive with the right flavor, firmness, shelf life, size, and appearance, often on a schedule that does not care much about the old boundaries of a local season.
The Cultivar Is the Business
Driscoll’s success is tied to advances in genetics that changed what berry production could deliver. Breeding became a way to manage the contradictions built into the crop: fruit delicate enough to taste good, sturdy enough to travel, and productive enough to justify the labor and infrastructure around it.
That work is easy to miss because consumers encounter the finished result in a plastic clamshell. But a branded berry depends on decisions made long before harvest, in trials where flavor and durability have to coexist. The company’s broader shift toward a data-driven operating model reflects the same basic logic: more information brought to a crop that has very little patience.
The year-round supply model also rearranged risk. Weather in one district does not necessarily end the program, but it can alter timing, quality, freight, and the value of a particular field. Growers are left balancing local conditions against specifications that may have been set far away, sometimes for a berry bred to perform under a different combination of heat, chill, and shipping distance.