Former Bank Officer’s New Career Is the Berries : Farming: Family frowned at the switch but now applauds burgeoning cranberry operation.

CHICAGO — When John Swendrowski, a high school football coach turned commercial banker, became interested in the cranberry business, his family questioned his sanity.

“For my parents to have a son who was a vice president of a bank, that was just awesome,” Swendrowski said. “Then when I called them in 1983 and told them I was quitting . . . to become a cranberry farmer, both my in-laws and my parents said, ‘You’re nuts.’ ”

Swendrowski, 47, is back in the family’s good graces again as president of Northland Cranberries Inc., the world’s largest independent grower of cranberries, based in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. The state is second behind Massachusetts in cranberry production.

Northland took a big step in 1993 when it separated from Ocean Spray, the cranberry growers cooperative.

Now, Northland is making another big step: getting out of commodity cranberries and into the juice business.

Northland Cranberries, a publicly traded company that had $21.8 million revenue in fiscal 1995, is launching a line of premium pure cranberry juices that it hopes will become a nationally distributed brand within five years.

The Northland-branded drinks will be a pure blend of cranberry juice with apple, raspberry, strawberry or grape juice.

“That’s our market niche,” Swendrowski said. “We think that there’s a market for a product that’s sweetened with juice to cut the tartness of the cranberry.”

Swendrowski said Northland, unlike Ocean Spray’s line of cranberry cocktails, will not be sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

Northland will also produce a line of juice drinks for the private-label market, offering products that carry a supermarket’s name, and these drinks will contain corn syrup.

The move into consumer products is admittedly a big step for Northland, which has been selling its crop to two private-label juice processors.

The harvest this fall will be the last it will deliver under contract to those processors.

Starting with the 1996 crop, Northland will devote its entire harvest to its own branded and private-label beverage business. It also sells fresh cranberries for home cooking under the Northland name.

“There is a major challenge in front of us,” Swendrowski said.

Dain Bosworth analyst Bonnie Wittenburg said she is optimistic about Northland’s chances for succeeding in the juice business, even though the move from being a grower to a marketer of produced foods is not without risk.

“In this particular case . . . I think it’s made easier by the fact that there is ultimately a limited supply of cranberries,” Wittenburg said.

Regulatory restrictions and cranberries’ need of wet, marshlike growing conditions make it difficult to farm more land, Swendrowski said. In addition, cranberries are grown from cuttings that take five years to mature.

Northland, which currently has 2,257 planted acres of cranberries, will probably expand its acreage through acquisitions, Swendrowski said. Since the company went public in 1987, Northland has averaged about two property acquisitions a year, he added.

Swendrowski said he hopes the move into selling juices, instead of just cranberries, will boost Northland’s sales and profit margins. In the year ended in March, earnings were hurt, despite higher revenue, by a higher percentage of spoilage and lower-than-expected yield.