Drupe

Today, we are heading to California's fertile San Joaquin Valley to visit one of America's premier family-owned fruit growers.

Our guest today is Daniel Jackson, owner of Family Tree Farms, a company that has become synonymous with exceptional blueberries and some of the sweetest stone fruit you'll ever taste.

The Jackson family has been farming their delicious fruit for over three generations, and our listeners know we love to highlight these multi-generational family farms on the show.

If you've ever bitten into a peach so juicy you needed two napkins or discovered blueberries, blackberries, or raspberries that were almost candy sweet, you've probably eaten two.

And there's about there's about a couple hundred of us that are live within a 10 mile radius of my home that are descendants of Herschel.

I am the youngest grandson of Herschel.

and uh so that's where that's where my story is and and that's kind of what started us my dad grew every uh variety that you could possibly imagine coming out of college he was the first one to graduate from college out of his family and uh established himself in the san joaquin valley and table grapes row crops and stone fruit actually did some work with sun world as you guys uh who you guys well know in the 1970s and 80s and uh Then inflation rates hit 18% and he had a chance to start over again in America.

So that's our story.

They're big guys.

So they're actually now in the stone fruit and citrus industry as commodities.

And they've been doing it for a little while now, and we're looking to grow that kind of to that grape standard or the avocados that they do or the persimmon size.

We want to get to that.

in? Some imported fruit.

Yeah, correct.

Imported probably some stone fruit and grapes.

Correct.

And that's to where it is today.

So he really grinded and started buying and accumulating more property and grew our stone fruit business and our almond business and really built the building blocks that you see today.

And then my father did the similar things.

And now I'm trying to do the same.

We were also growing almonds.

We were vertically integrated in both.

We were vertically integrated in the stone fruit, vertically integrated in the almonds, from planting to packing to selling the whole supply chain there.

But in 2008, I actually made a presentation at our family board meeting that we have every year.

Yeah.

It's a stone fruit, and it is.

I guess when you are dealing with the whole fruit, it is a very wispy kind of on-your-palate-and-gone kind of a deal.

That's

I think you would do well to have something like that because you can convert a lot of people into believers when they have one of those on like an 85 degree day in the sun.

Well, you know, when I drink, when we came up with our line of Splash, which, you know, basically to compete against alternatives or seltzers.

We also had Stone Fruit, which is a peach-based seltzer.

And that also sold really, really well.