Chinese production grew 25-fold since 2010; China now world’s top grower
About 15 years ago, executives from Driscoll’s — a privately held California company whose roots stretch to two strawberry growers in the early 1900s — traveled to China with a goal of turning blueberries into the country’s next big food trend, the Journal’s Jon Emont reported. The company sent one of its top blueberry experts, John Weisz, renowned inside the company for opening a production hub in Mexico, to scout farmland in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, the Journal reported. Driscoll’s executives had toured Latin America and Asia around 2012 and settled on blueberries after deciding raspberries and blackberries were too unfamiliar to Chinese palates and that Japanese firms already controlled the strawberry market.
Driscoll’s contracted with global blueberry-genetics firms to lock up the best varieties and brought in high-tech growing technologies, the Journal reported. By 2020, the company was producing thousands of tons of blueberries for Chinese supermarkets. It eventually partnered with more than 150 growers in Yunnan to produce about 30,000 metric tons of fresh blueberries a year — roughly what California produces annually, the Journal reported. At a nursery in the province, the company grew millions of plants under LED lights for distribution to local farmers.
Yunnan’s climate suited berries — sunny days followed by cool evenings — but soil quality was often poor, and Driscoll’s neighbors dumped wastewater near its fields, the Journal reported. Driscoll’s abandoned its original open-field game plan, choosing instead to grow bushes in greenhouses using coconut-fiber pots, with filtered water and nutrients delivered through drip-irrigation technology. “Everybody thinks China [is] cheap, but that’s really not how we did it,” Soren Bjorn, who stepped down as Driscoll’s chief executive this summer as part of a planned transition, told the Journal. Growing blueberries in China, he said, is “the highest cost we have anywhere in the world.”
One of Driscoll’s main varieties was Eureka Sunrise, a breed with large sweet berries developed by Mountain Blue, an Australian company. Around 2014, Driscoll’s licensed Mountain Blue varieties exclusively in China for a multiyear period, the Journal reported. Blueberries quickly became a consumer hit. Parents snapped them up, convinced they could fight eye fatigue in children accustomed to staring at screens. Ice-cream shops began offering blueberry ice cream, and sweet and sour blueberry tea became a big seller. Pinko Liu, a 30-year-old from Zhejiang province on China’s east coast, told the Journal she ate up to a pound of blueberries every day for two years. “I never expected blueberries could taste this crisp and sweet,” she said.
Then came the competition. Chinese entrepreneurs piled in as tales of blueberry fortunes spread. Shenzhen-based pesticide giant Noposion scooped up thousands of acres to grow blueberries, the Journal reported. State media lauded the crop as a “golden fruit” that could revive rural economies, and state banks offered a special category of loans for blueberry growers. Jack Zhu, a Beijing private-equity investor hunting for a second act as opportunities elsewhere dried up, told the Journal that blueberry growers were reporting returns on investment as high as 200%. In 2024 he went all in, leasing 250 acres in Yunnan through his company Lanxing Agriculture. He poured money into the operation, enabling it to whisk berries onto store shelves via refrigerated trucks within two days of picking, the Journal reported. Che Zhihan, a 35-year-old former excavator operator, said he heard about the boom from friends and invested $180,000 in a small high-tech farm using drip-irrigation technology from Israeli-founded Orbia Netafim — financed by a bank loan, the Journal reported.
Chinese farmers adopted drip-irrigation technology similar to Driscoll’s and allegedly copied greenhouse designs used by farmers growing for the U.S. company, the Journal reported. More consequentially, some obtained cuttings from berry plants on existing farms and reproduced them without licenses, according to people in the industry and subsequent Chinese court rulings cited by the Journal.
Going after Chinese copycats posed risks for Driscoll’s, the Journal reported. If it sued them, it might be typecast as an American agriculture giant stomping on Chinese farmers. Sitting still wasn’t a great option, either. Other Western companies launched investigations that caught farmers using Driscoll’s plants. A subsidiary of Planasa, a Spanish blueberry-genetics firm, sent investigators to look into a Yunnan company it suspected of mass-producing a different variety called Blue Maldiva. Investigators posed as blueberry farmers to buy sample plants from the grower, the Journal reported.
An employee of the Yunnan company explained in WeChat messages to Planasa’s undercover investigator that, in addition to having the Blue Maldiva variety, his company had “pulled some strings” to obtain Eureka Sunrise plant cuttings from a Driscoll’s farm, according to messages contained in the court record of a Planasa lawsuit against the grower. “Of course it was done secretly, because their variety is protected and they would never just give it to us,” the employee said, according to the court record. DNA testing and the grower’s admissions led a Chinese court to rule that most of the nursery’s plants — including the Driscoll’s Eureka Sunrise variety — were being grown illegally. The court ordered the grower, whose name was not disclosed in court proceedings, to destroy the plants and pay some $23,000 in fees and damages, the Journal reported.
Driscoll’s has filed more than 20 cases against companies in China, winning two, Bjorn said, according to the Journal. The Australian company Mountain Blue, which owns Eureka Sunrise and other top varieties, began offering access to other Chinese companies beyond Driscoll’s — a shift the Journal reported was driven by the volume of pirated plantings already in the ground. In February, Noposion announced that a subsidiary had secured a Mountain Blue license. Separately, Noposion told shareholders in May that many of its subsidiaries were being sued by a Planasa subsidiary for illicitly growing their blueberries, and that an initial court ruling had ordered them to pay around $1.3 million. Noposion subsidiaries have countersued Planasa, alleging they received low-quality plants from the company, the Journal reported.
Production surged faster than demand could absorb it. Blueberry prices in China have fallen by half or more since the boom began, the Journal reported. Zhu told the Journal that Yunnan berry sales prices fell from $45 a kilogram in 2021 to $15 a kilogram this year. Che, the former excavator operator, said he was glad his first harvest came through last year and that he hopes to break even soon; he would not consider expanding, he said, because the market has reached saturation. Zhu said he still expects decent profits, but nothing like what the market promised a few years ago. “Of course the industry will boom in a very short time, but it will also lead to a price war,” Zhu said, according to the Journal.
For Chinese consumers, the collapse registered as abundance: state media trumpeted an era of “blueberry freedom,” in which even ordinary people could gorge on a once-exotic fruit, the Journal reported.
Driscoll’s was hit like everyone else. Although the company declined to provide profitability numbers, its farmers in China have experienced steadily falling profits, according to one of its former growers and others in the industry cited by the Journal. Competition in China “is fiercer than in any other part of the world,” Bjorn, the former CEO, said.
Enforcement has gotten harder, the Journal reported. Chinese producers are catching on to private investigators’ tactics and refusing to offer samples to unknown buyers. Some Western growers believe Chinese growers have been mixing illicitly obtained protected varieties with other blueberry plants, making it harder to enforce intellectual-property claims.
The episode fits a pattern the Journal describes as “involution”: cheap state-backed financing, copycat tactics and rapid scale-up that have overrun sectors ranging from coffee to athletic apparel. Nike and Starbucks have faced similar pressures in China, the Journal reported. The International Blueberry Organization, a global trade group, warned in an August report that “the sheer volume of illegal nurseries and plantings means many thousands of illegal hectares will continue in operation as they are, with thousands more to come,” the Journal reported.
The broader pattern extends well beyond blueberries. China resisted for decades developing the kinds of large, corporate farms that turned the United States into an agricultural powerhouse, the Journal reported. Now, with what the paper described as “some ingenuity, technology and copycat tactics,” the country is becoming competitive in more farm products, and big agricultural companies are playing a larger role. China is growing new cash crops such as avocados and durian, and is producing so much tomato paste that Italian farmers launched a protest flotilla two years ago to oppose the unloading of Chinese tomato products in the port of Salerno, the Journal reported. Satellite data from University of Copenhagen academics, published in the journal Nature Food, showed that roughly 60% of the world’s greenhouses were in China as of 2019, dramatically increasing fruit and vegetable yields; more recent data puts the figure even higher, the Journal reported.
Farmers worldwide had hoped China’s 1.4 billion consumers would continue devouring more foreign produce. Although the country still imports large quantities of soybeans, beef and dairy products, agricultural imports have stagnated in recent years as Chinese food output grows, the Journal reported. China agreed to allow fresh American blueberry imports in 2020, but expanding domestic production and tariffs have shut U.S. farmers out of the market.
Driscoll’s has begun growing more offseason blueberries in China and is increasing blueberry exports from Yunnan to other Asian countries, the Journal reported. The company said it hopes staying in China, where per-capita blueberry consumption remains below U.S. and European levels, will still pay off in the long term, and that it sees an opportunity for sustained investment and growth.
“It’s like, welcome to China,” said David Smith, a fruit-industry consultant in Shanghai. “Whatever they get into, they just dwarf other countries once they decide to grow it.”