MONTEREY, Calif. — Chelan Fresh sought to spread the joy at the recent Organic Produce Summit at the Monterey Conference Center on July 14, where the Chelan, Wash.-based company featured its new tree fruit brand, Joyfully Grown Organics.
The first shipments of the company’s fruit under the conventional Joyfully Grown and Joyfully Grown Organics labels are coming this fall, with the 2022 apple and pear harvest, said the company. Cherries under the new brand will be available in the late spring of 2023.
“Chelan Fresh isn’t known by the consumer,” Darrin Carpenter of Chelan Fresh told The Packer during a booth visit at OPS. This new brand “ups Chelan’s fruit game,” he added. Much in the way Chelan’s SugarBee apple character has created a buzzworthy brand.
“Everyone loves the SugarBee apple character,” Carpenter enthused. “We need more of that feel-good branding.”
Boxes for the organic line employ a fun mix of colors, including lavender, shades of green and red, while a QR code on the box is designed to market straight to the consumer, Carpenter explained.
“How long will the consumer stand there and read [about a product] in the store? This way they can go deeper if they want with the QR code,” he added.
Work on the new brand started last fall with a series of grower interviews and feedback sessions, said company leaders in a press release earlier this month.
The process resulted in the creation of the Joyfully Grown brand, which the company said is a “transformative, yet simple” word combination.
The brand message conveys, in part, the many joys of farming and marketing fruit. Those joys include caring for orchards, growing fruit and watching new generations elevate to leadership, said the release.
Twenty-somethings today want to know everything about how and where their food is grown, said Carpenter. If a farmer turns on the irrigation in the apple orchard, they want to know about it. “And that trend is not going back. They will only want to know more.”
Chelan will use the new brand for its entire offering of non-proprietary apple varieties, which includes Honeycrisp, granny smith, fuji, Pink Lady and others. Joyfully Grown will also be featured on all varieties of its pears, as well as Rainier and sweet red cherries.