National Crambery

National Cranberry Cooperative, 1996

Management 404 – Case Study #3

National Cranberry Cooperative is an organization that was form and it is owned by growers of cranberries to process and market their berries. NCC is one of the largest cooperative in the industry, with operations in all principal growing areas such as: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon. Industry data for U.S production and sales of cranberries, showed an increasing surplus of cranberries produced over those utilized. Taking that in consideration, in 1993, the growers resorted to the Agriculture Marketing Agreement Act that would regulate and control the size of an agricultural crop. Furthermore, in 1995, under the Cranberry Marketing Order, the growers agreed that 10% of the crop, which amounted to more that than 200,000 barrels, should be set aside. There are two types of harvesting cranberries: water harvesting, where the bogs were flooded, the berries were mechanically shaken from the bushes and then easily collected at the surface of the water, and dry harvesting, where berries were hand-picked from the bushes.

Receiving Plant No. 1 received both “fresh“fruit (preparing the berries for sale as whole fresh fruit) and “process” fruit operation (prepares berries for juice, canning, freezing), during a season that usually started early in September and finished by early December. One of the major issue that this plan is facing is that is takes too much time to unload the process fruit from the trucks into the receiving plant. The process at the plant is highly mechanized. Several operations are performing: receiving and testing, dumping, temporary holding, destoning, dechaffing, drying, separation, and bulking and bagging. It usually takes from 7 to 8 minutes to back a truck onto a dumper, empty its contents, and leave the platform. However, some trucks have to wait sometimes several hours to empty their contents because the holding bins become full and there was...