A Wisconsin Rapids banker, cranberry marshes and a break with Ocean Spray.

Northland is an American cranberry juice brand. It began as the brand of a grower rather than a bottler: Northland Cranberries, Inc., of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. The company’s history is set out in a profile from the International Directory of Company Histories, reproduced by FundingUniverse, which follows the business up to the end of 2000. It says the company grew out of a small group of limited partnerships of Wisconsin cranberry growers put together by John Swendrowski, who became its president and chief executive.

Swendrowski came to cranberries from outside the trade. The profile says he had been an English teacher and football coach at a Catholic high school, ran a truck-leasing business, and then became a loan officer at the Wood County Bank, where he was put in charge of loans to cranberry growers. He formed partnerships to buy marshes and improve them, and in 1987 he left the bank and consolidated them into a publicly traded company, incorporated as Northland Cranberries.

In its early years Northland sold its whole crop to one customer, the grower cooperative Ocean Spray Cranberries, under contract. That changed in the early 1990s. The profile says that in mid-1992 Northland announced it was ending its exclusive relationship with Ocean Spray, and that it divided its 1993 crop between two independent fruit processors, Cliffstar Corp. of Dunkirk, New York, and Clement Pappas & Co. of Seabrook, New Jersey. In 1991 the company had also leased cranberry bogs on Nantucket Island, a move outside Wisconsin.

The Northland name went onto the market in two steps. The profile says that in 1994 the company built a new facility for receiving, processing, storing and packaging its berries, and began selling fresh berries in bags under the Northland name, placing them in supermarkets across the country. The next year, 1995, it introduced Northland cranberry juice blends, starting in its home state of Wisconsin. The opening range mixed cranberry with other juices, with flavours such as Cranberry Raspberry and Cranberry Cherry.

Seneca, a national rollout, Ocean Spray, Apple & Eve and Lassonde.

The juice was positioned against the brand’s former customer. According to the company history, Northland’s blends were made entirely from juice, sweetened by mixing cranberry with lighter juices such as apple and grape, while Ocean Spray’s cranberry products were juice drinks diluted with water and sweeteners. The profile calls this the key marketing difference between the two brands. Swendrowski described the move into branded juice as a vertical integration strategy that ran “from marsh to market”, in an interview with Beverage Industry in June 1997.

National distribution followed quickly. The profile says Northland began a national rollout of its juices in 1997, backed by advertising on radio, television and in print that told shoppers its products were all juice. The company also signed a three-year agreement with the Ladies Professional Golf Association that made Northland the “Official Juice of the LPGA”. In 1996 it had agreed with the German drinks company Rudolf Wild GmbH to sell its cranberry concentrate in Europe.

In 1998 the company bought the juice division of Seneca Foods, the profile says, taking over bottling and packaging plants in Dundee, New York, Mountain Home, North Carolina, and Jackson, Wyoming, the exclusive rights to the Seneca juice name, and the TreeSweet, Awake and Orange Plus brands. It entered foodservice the same year, selling Northland juices to hospitals, schools and restaurants. Falling cranberry prices then changed the picture: early in 2000 Northland sold its private-label juice business to Cliffstar, and late that year it handed much of the sales and marketing support for its Northland and Seneca juices to the outside firm Crossmark.

The grower and the brand later separated. FoodNavigator-USA reported on 25 February 2005 that in September 2004 Northland had agreed to sell Ocean Spray its cranberry receiving and concentrate plant, the adjacent office building and its stock of frozen cranberries, while keeping its brand and retail juice business. The same report said Northland had now sold that branded juice business to Apple & Eve of Port Washington, New York. The sale included the Northland, Treesweet and Awake brands and an assignment of the Seneca brand licence, along with a cranberry concentrate supply agreement. Swendrowski attributed the sale to a strongly competitive shelf-stable juice market, and said the business would move to Apple & Eve over the following 60 days.

Apple & Eve then changed hands. Lassonde Industries of Rougemont, Quebec, announced on 4 July 2014 a definitive agreement to acquire Apple & Eve, with closing expected that month, and New Hope Network reported on 7 July 2014 that Apple & Eve, founded by the Crane family, owned and marketed juices under the Northland, Seneca and The Switch brands. The Northland website today says it is owned by Northland Products, LLC, and refers to the Lassonde network.

Design and documentation.

Juice brands in general reach the shelf in a handful of familiar containers: glass bottles, plastic bottles, paperboard cartons, cans and small pouches or boxes made for a lunchbox. Each container shapes what a brand can do with its identity. A bottle can carry a moulded shape, an embossed name or a neck label; a carton offers flat panels that work almost like a printed poster; a can wraps its graphics around a cylinder that is usually seen from one side at a time.

Because the liquid inside often looks much alike from one brand to the next, the label tends to do the work of telling them apart: the name, the colours, a drawing of fruit or vegetables, and sometimes a story about the family, the farm or the town where the business began. Some juice names stay with the family that started them, while others change hands more than once over the decades.

Each guide sets out what independent sources record about the brand — who founded it, who owns it now, where its juice is made and how its labels and containers have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A grower’s name on a bag of berries, a juice-versus-drink argument and a pink campaign.

Northland’s identity started with a name on produce. The company history says the brand reached shoppers in 1994 on bags of fresh cranberries, a year before the juice. The brand’s own website opens its story in the same state: it says Northland began more than thirty years ago making cranberry juice in Wisconsin, which it calls the heart of cranberry country.

The early marketing was built on a single argument about what was in the bottle. In the profile’s account, Northland’s radio, television and print advertising of 1997 told consumers that its blends were all juice and set them against juice drinks, a separate category. In the same period the LPGA agreement linked the Northland name with women’s professional golf.

Under Apple & Eve the brand took on a cause campaign. Silvestro Marketing, a marketing agency, says on its website that it helped launch and manage Northland Juices’ Drink to Pink campaign for more than ten years, benefiting the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The agency says it created the programme’s name and messaging and designed its marketing communications in stores and online, including promotions timed to October and to Mother’s Day.

The current website carries the line “The Power of Dark Fruit”, and its range pairs cranberry with other deep-coloured fruit, in flavours such as Cranberry Grape, Cranberry Pomegranate and Cranberry Raspberry, alongside a Blueberry Blackberry Açaí blend. Cranberry Raspberry was also one of the flavours of the 1995 launch, according to the company history.

For a design guide, Northland shows how a grower’s brand can be built on one comparison, juice against juice drink, and later regrouped around a colour idea after the marshes and the brand went separate ways. Compare it with Ocean Spray, the cooperative that bought Northland’s crop and later its concentrate plant, and Welch’s, another American brand of grape and fruit juices. For this guide we use cranberry red, dark fruit purple, frost cream and marsh green with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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