Cash Crops
Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Tree Top: Creating a Fruit Revolution (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2010) by David H. Stratton. This coffee table book was published to mark Tree Top’s 50th anniversary.
In 1951, Life magazine ran a photograph showing a bulldozer shoving tons of discarded apples into a mountainous pile at the Yakima city dump. Pigs rooted around in the mess. The apples consisted of fruit that orchardists had discarded because they failed to meet the grading standards of size, shape, or color that grocery stores required for their fresh apples.
It was by finding an economical way to use those rejected apples, the “culls” or “sortouts,” that orchardists paid to have hauled away, that Tree Top Inc., an agricultural cooperative based in Selah, just north of Yakima, grew to be one of the world’s largest processors of apples and pears with 2009 sales of $360 million. The cooperative, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, has played a crucial part in helping to maintain the role of apples as the state’s most valuable agricultural commodity, ranked ahead of milk and wheat.
Tree Top’s seven plants use those culled apples to produce apple juice and cider as the backbone of its retail market in 30 states, with core outlets in the West and Southwest. The firm also distributes consumer packaged goods, such as fresh apple slices, blends with other juices and apple sauce. In addition, it sells as bulk “ingredients” a wide variety of dried and frozen fruit products as well as juice concentrates and purees used by international and domestic food industries. Tree Top managed that most wonderful of miracles: “making something out of nothing.” That magic has helped the cooperative’s 1,062 grower-members receive financial returns from their once-worthless culls.
“We’ve put a floor under the fresh apple market where none previously existed,” said Raymond C. O’Neal of Chelan, a former board chair. “Tree Top has [also] successfully developed the processing pear, just as it did the processing apple.” A Seattle newspaper described the role played by processors like Tree Top as a “safety net” for the overall industry.
Characteristic of its headquarters location in rural Washington, Tree Top has pitched its major advertising and marketing programs on the basis of time-honored, small-town values familiar across America, taking pride in “the warmth and country feel” of its
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