Essay About National Cranberry Cooperative And Will Walliston

National Cranburry Company
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National Cranberry Cooperative (Abridged)
On February 14, 1981, Hugo Schaeffer, vice president of operations at the National Cranberry
Cooperative (NCC), called his assistant, Mel OBrien, into his office and said:
Mel, I spent all day yesterday reviewing last falls process fruit operations at receiving
plant #1 [RP1] with Will Walliston, the superintendent, and talking with the co-op members
[growers] in that area. Its obvious to me that we havent solved our problems at that plant,
yet. Even though we spent $100,000 last winter for a fifth Kiwanee dumper at RP1, our
overtime costs were still out of control this fall, and the growers are still upset that their trucks
and drivers had to spend so much time waiting to unload process fruit into the receiving plant.
I cant blame them for being upset. They are the owners of this cooperative, and they resent
having to lease trucks and hire drivers to get the berries out of the field and then watch them
stand idle, waiting to unload.
Walliston thinks that the way to avoid these problems next fall is to buy and install two
new dryers [$40,000 each], and to convert our dry berry holding bins so that they can be used
to store either water-harvested or dry berries [$7,500 per bin]. I want you to go out there and
take a hard look at that operation and find out what we need to do to improve operations
before the 1981 crop comes in. Were going to have to move quickly if we are going to order
new dryers, since the equipment and installation lead times are in excess of six months. By the
way, the growers in that region indicated that they plan on about the same size crop this year
as last. But it looks like the percentage of water-harvested berries this year will increase to 70%
of total process fruit from last years 58%.
NCC and the Cranberry Industry
NCC was an organization formed and owned by growers of cranberries to process and market
their berries. In recent years 99% of all sales of cranberries were made by the various cooperatives
active in the cranberry industry.