Juice Business Ripe for Picking

It might be a tight squeeze, but Ojai residents Mike Ranelle and Reggie Ferguson think they’ve been able to carve a valuable niche in Ventura County’s slumping Valencia orange industry.

The Texas-born entrepreneurs are working with local growers to take oranges that might not make it to market and press them into juice, bottling the nectar and trucking it to dozens of stores and restaurants across the Ojai Valley.

Since taking over a downtown juicing operation last summer, their Ojai Fresh Juice Co. has been pumping out about 400 gallons of orange juice a week, tapping a network of about 50 family farmers from Ojai to Fillmore to feed their high-powered juice machines.

“Without us, a lot of this fruit would just fall to the ground,” said Ranelle, who had been working as a stock trader and analyst for a Fort Worth investment company before joining the juice company.

“The way the market is now, people are not making money on Valencias; in fact, I’m seeing farmers all over ripping up Valencia trees and trying to plant other things,” he said. “At least with us, they are able to make a little money, pay their bills and maintain their groves.”

While Valencias remain a strong component of the county’s $1-billion-a-year farm economy, growers have suffered major losses in recent years.

Once the county’s second-biggest cash crop, Valencia oranges barely crack the top 10 today after growers uprooted thousands of trees in favor of crops better able to turn a profit in California’s competitive fruit and vegetable markets. In fact, after an 80% plunge from 1999 to 2000, values have collapsed to 1970 levels.

And the amount of land dedicated to Valencias has dropped by half--to 9,300 acres--during the last 30 years, prompting concerns that the industry may soon reach a threshold at which it no longer makes economic sense to farm oranges.

The downturn has been especially hard on smaller growers, who generally have fewer options for marketing their fruit and more often face the prospect of letting some of the crop go to waste because it would cost too much to pick.

Sending more of those oranges to the juicer will not by itself be enough to rescue the industry from its economic free fall, farm leaders say. But it provides another outlet to growers struggling to get their oranges to market and demonstrates the kind of initiative that will be needed to help keep the industry afloat.

“I think we’re going to see a lot more of this very type of niche marketing,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “If people are going to stay in the orange business, they are going to have to start looking at different ways to turn things around.”

Juicing Offers Growers a Compromise Option

Ojai orange grower Michael Bennett has given that prospect plenty of thought.

He farms about three acres of Valencias on the valley’s east side. And like other growers, he has seen the industry get hammered by retail consolidation, rising production costs and increased competition from around the globe, especially Australia and South America.

It’s not feasible to pick and sell the fruit himself, he said, because he runs an educational video company. And if he lets Oxnard-based Food Share pick the crop, he wouldn’t get any money for his oranges, although he would be able to write off the donation on his taxes.

For now, Bennett said, he’s happy to sell his fruit to the juice company, a deal that allows him to earn enough money to recover some of the costs of growing the crop.

Besides, everywhere he looks these days, it seems like someone is guzzling his juice.

“It’s a good feeling to see people drinking my juice, and they really seem to like it,” said Bennett, whose oranges were being picked last week by the Ojai juice company. “We always have the option of ripping out the trees and putting in other crops, but I’m not ready to do that. At this point, I’d be happy to earn enough money this year to pay my water bill.”

The Ojai juicing company was launched nearly two decades ago by local resident Lee Cannaday, who marketed the product under the Squeez-ums label.

Since Ranelle, 32, and Ferguson, 31, bought it in July, they’ve added a dozen accounts and expanded the network of growers from which they can buy squeezable fruit. They’ve added staff members, including their old Fort Worth high school chum Scott Comerford, who is in charge of sales and is becoming a full partner.

They’ve even added a second product line, having squeezed their first batch of lemonade from locally grown lemons a couple of weeks ago.

Oranges remain the mainstay, however.

After the oranges are picked--as many as 50 boxes a day by full-time picker Ruben Ramirez--they are trucked to the company’s headquarters, which consists of a small office, a walk-in freezer and a “clean room,” where the juicing is done.

Three days a week, the oranges are sorted by size, then dumped into a juicer where they are sucked down into the machinery, pierced with three metal valves and squeezed for all they are worth.

The juice runs down to a metal trough, and the bottles are filled one by one and delivered to stores and restaurants the same day.

“We’ve pretty much got the Henry Ford method going on,” said Ferguson, who is also a chef at a local restaurant.

The Ojai juice may cost a little more than some brand name juices, Ferguson said. But none of the company’s juice is pasteurized and no preservatives are added, meaning customers are getting a product loaded with nutrients and flavor.

“Everyone else advertises that they are fresh-squeezed, but we like to say that our juice is ‘just squeezed,’ ” Ferguson said. “We want customers to know that the juice they are drinking today was picked off the tree yesterday. Most of it is selling off the shelves.”

Other Fruit Seen as Likely Prospects

The operation squeezes about 12,000 pounds of oranges a week, and the partners have plans to expand. They also want to tap other local produce--everything from strawberries to peaches--to bottle and blend.

And they want to push their product into outlets across Southern California, taking pride in the idea that what’s good for their business will also be good for Ventura County growers.

“I think we can play a huge role in helping to support local growers, simply because of how we are going to grow,” Ranelle said. “The growers in this area have really good, sweet fruit. It’s time people outside the county knew about it.”