One foggy May morning, the Joy Makers, a team of scientists employed by Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, gathered at its research-and-development campus, which is known as Cassin Ranch, in the small agricultural town of Watsonville, on California’s Central Coast. Before them was a table laden with plastic clamshells: red, white, and pink strawberries for the pipeline. Phil Stewart, an affably geeky, sandy-haired strawberry geneticist, offered me a yellowish-white specimen with rosy stains, like a skinned knee when the blood starts seeping through. The Joy Makers watched expectantly as I tasted it. The fruit, an unpatented variety referred to as 21AA176, was juicy and soft, mildly astringent but tropical, reminiscent of white tea. “It goes back to a variety called White Carolina, which is maybe the oldest strawberry variety still in existence,” Stewart said. “It dates back to the seventeen-hundreds.”
In some Asian markets, white fruit is coveted, and Driscoll’s has conducted commercial trials in Hong Kong. But although the company has been breeding whites for fifteen years, it has yet to introduce any to U.S. grocery stores; Americans, accustomed to an aggressive cold chain, typically fear underripe fruit. “I brought these to a wedding, and all the parents were telling their kids not to eat the white ones,” a Joy Maker remarked. Lately, however, Driscoll’s focus groups have shown that millennials, adventurous and open-minded in their eating habits, and easily seduced by novelty, may embrace pale berries. With these consumers, unburdened by preconceived notions of what a white berry should look or taste like, Driscoll’s has a priceless opportunity: the definitional power that comes with first contact. Before that can happen, though, the berries must conform to Driscoll’s aesthetic standards. Stewart held a 21AA176 up to his face and inspected it carefully. “Microcracking,” he said, pointing out some barely perceptible brown spots, caused by moisture on the plastic packaging, that were marring the surface. “This is not going to go forward.”
Driscoll’s, a fourth-generation family business, says that it controls roughly a third of the six-billion-dollar U.S. berry market, including sixty per cent of organic strawberries, forty-six per cent of blackberries, fourteen per cent of blueberries, and just about every raspberry you don’t pick yourself. Miles Reiter is the chairman; his family owns some seventy per cent of the company, which develops proprietary breeds, licenses them exclusively to approved Driscoll’s growers, and sells the fruit under one of the few widely recognizable brand names in the fresh section of the grocery store. Though the farming is technically outsourced, the Reiters also own a farming company, run by Miles’s brother Garland, which grows about a third of Driscoll’s fruit. “We’re commonly referred to as the Evil Empire,” Allison Reiter Kambic, one of Miles’s daughters, told me ruefully. “They’re the leaders,” Herb Baum, who for decades led the berry coöperative Naturipe, said. “I regret to say, as I worked for a competitor.” At ninety, Baum is retired, but when he tells people that he worked in strawberries and they say, “Oh, Driscoll’s?” he knows just how Salieri felt.
Produce is war, and it is won by having something beautiful-looking to sell at Costco when the competition has only cat-faced uglies. In the eighties, beset by takeover ambitions from Chiquita, Del Monte, and Dole, Driscoll’s embarked on a new vision: all four berries, all year round. Otherwise, Miles told me, “we could be outflanked.” Driscoll’s berries are grown in twenty-one countries and sold in forty-eight; since the nineties, the company has invested heavily in Mexico. Driscoll’s sells more than a billion clamshells every year; it was Driscoll’s idea to put berries into clamshells in the first place. At the corporate offices, in a business park a few miles from Cassin Ranch, interactive maps mounted on the walls monitor every truck carrying Driscoll’s fruit in North America, some two hundred and fifty at any given time. An alarm goes off if a truck’s temperature deviates from an accepted range, if a truck stops for too long (in Las Vegas, for instance), or if security is breached. A full load of strawberries is worth about fifty thousand dollars; blueberries garner twice as much. The maps resemble battle plans, with armies of trucks fanning out across the continent.
Strawberries can be orange or white, the size of a pinkie tip, oblong, conjoined or bloblike, ecstatic, defiant, ungainly, unique. But you don’t think of them that way. What you picture is a Driscoll’s berry: glossy, red, and heart-shaped, and firm enough to ship to the East Coast or to the Middle East and eat two weeks past the harvest date. Driscoll’s berries tend to lack the sugar rush and perfumed oomph of a tiny sun-warmed heirloom discovered on a country lane. Since the company’s inception, it has placed an emphasis on appearance. “We have helped shape what a strawberry looks like with our relentless focus,” Soren Bjorn, the company’s president, said. Its cultivars—the genetically distinct new varieties it creates through breeding—and the germplasm, the genetic library of plants its breeders can draw on as parents for future cultivars, constitute the company’s intellectual property. Speaking with a legal newspaper, Driscoll’s senior vice-president and general counsel compared the company to its neighbors in Silicon Valley. “Growers are sort of like our manufacturing plants,” he said. “We make the inventions, they assemble it, and then we market it, so it’s not that dissimilar from Apple using someone else to do the manufacturing but they’ve made the invention and marketed the end product.” Like Apple, Driscoll’s guards its I.P. jealously.
Berries are the top-grossing produce in the supermarket. (“I remember when we were little and berries surpassed bananas in revenue,” Brie Reiter Smith, Miles’s oldest daughter, who is the general manager of North American production, said.) According to Frances Dillard, Driscoll’s global brand strategist and a veteran of Disney’s consumer-products division, berries are the produce category most associated with happiness. (Kale, in contrast, has a health-control, “me” focus.) On a slide that Dillard prepared, mapping psychographic associations with various fruits, strawberries floated between Freedom and Harmony, in a zone marked Extrovert, above a word cloud that read “Social, pleasure, joy, balance, conviviality, friendship, warmth, soft, natural, sharing.” (Blueberries vibed as status-oriented, demanding, and high-tech.) As I studied the slide over Dillard’s shoulder in her office, she smiled tightly and said, “This is proprietary.”
In apples, varieties are obvious—Fuji, Braeburn, Honeycrisp—and at farmers’ markets and certain specialty stores strawberries, too, are sold by name. (In early summer, Bi-Rite, a fancy grocer in San Francisco, announced the much anticipated arrival of Seascapes and Chandlers with cardboard strawberries dangling from the ceiling.) But most strawberries meet our mouths anonymously. Compared with tree fruits, which take a decade or two and a small fortune to produce, strawberries are quick and cheap; plants, hardiest in their first year, are ripped out after a single harvest. Growing in microseasons and microclimates, and easily falling victim to mildew, weather, and pests, strawberries are sensitive and fleeting. The contents of a clamshell in April are likely to be Marquis berries from Oxnard, where Driscoll’s has a large operation; by June, they’re probably Del Reys out of Watsonville. It takes about six years to develop and test a cultivar, but Driscoll’s releases several in North America each year; in addition, it maintains breeding programs around the world to furnish its various geographies with berries tailored to the local conditions. (Varieties are made obsolete based on the decisions of an internal group called the Dead Variety Society.) For the shopper, the only impression that matters is the Driscoll’s name, and the red berries, as uniform as soldiers or paper valentines.
For decades, Driscoll’s most forbidding competition has come from an unexpected direction: a thriving strawberry-breeding program at the University of California, Davis, which, for nearly thirty years, was led by Doug Shaw and his colleague Kirk Larson. The program is Driscoll’s antithesis—public, open, nonexclusive—supplying, for a nominal royalty fee, any grower wishing to use its plants, and sharing crucial information about horticulture derived from its research. University berries are not labelled as such, but they account for the vast majority of strawberries grown in California, and in the world. During their time, Shaw and Larson worked assiduously to advance the university’s germplasm, creating crosses that would result in commercial cultivars that farmers deemed worthy of planting; every farm the university supplied was another acre not given over to Driscoll’s.
During the taste-testing at Cassin Ranch, the Joy Makers encouraged me to try Albion, a university berry invented by Shaw, only to deride its physique and criticize its crunchiness. (Two weeks earlier, in Oxnard, I had preferred a university variety in a blind tasting, unleashing a cascade of explanations: this time there would be no chance of embarrassment for either party.) According to Driscoll’s employees, university varieties tended to be dull-hued, malformed, seedy at the tip. I mentioned that my favorite variety was Gaviota, another Shaw berry, which I get from Harry’s Berries at the Friday farmers’ market in my neighborhood, and which to me seems exceptionally complex and flavorful. They quickly disabused me. “There’s nothing special in the genetics,” Michael Schwieterman, a biochemist, said. What I was enjoying was overripe, he said pityingly, and wouldn’t survive the weekend.
Behind the animosity lies a desperation that everyone in the business feels. Even as demand from consumers remains strong, the strawberry industry has been contracting rapidly; there are now thirty per cent fewer acres under cultivation than there were in 2013. (With a sharp decline in migration from Mexico and Central America, the primary sources of agricultural labor for half a century, “stoop work”—jobs requiring harvesters to crouch doubled over for hours a day—has become difficult to hire for. Nearly every farm I passed in Watsonville, in May and June, had a sign by the road saying “Se Solicitan Piscadores.” At the same time, changing minimum-wage and overtime laws have made labor more expensive.) A suite of troublesome diseases has emerged as long-standing soil fumigants are being banned. This past winter, a five-year drought was followed by a Biblical deluge. New varieties are the only way forward, and it is the savviest breeder with access to the best germplasm who will prevail.
According to scholars of medieval art, the strawberry is a symbol of perfect righteousness. But the story of Driscoll’s long dominion begins with what might be perceived as an original sin: in the midst of the Second World War, the group of growers that eventually became Driscoll’s got hold of the university’s germplasm, hired its chief breeders, and created a strawberry leviathan.
By then, the Reiters were established berry growers, alongside their relatives the Driscolls. The first Reiter, a butcher who eventually farmed near Watsonville, where there was a nascent strawberry industry, came to California from Alsace in 1849. Wild strawberries grew abundantly in the sandy soils along the Central Coast; in “A History of the Strawberry,” Stephen Wilhelm and James Sagen write that, in peak season, Native Americans would camp beside the patches and eat for a week. The conditions were ideal: cold fog in the morning, mild sun in the afternoon. The butcher’s son, J. E. (Ed) Reiter, started growing with his brother-in-law, R. F. (Dick) Driscoll. One summer, Ed’s sister, visiting friends at a guest ranch in Shasta County, was served some especially sweet and shapely berries for breakfast; when she got back to Watsonville, she told her brother, setting in motion what family members thereafter referred to as “the California strawberry gold rush.”
In 1904, at Cassin Ranch, Reiter and Driscoll planted the berry that came to be called Banner. Other berries at the time were awkward and irregular; Banners were exceptionally consistent. Already shrewd marketers, the brothers-in-law began an energetic promotional campaign, declaring Banner “A Wonder: The talk of the Pacific Coast. People write about it to their Eastern Friends.” For more than a decade, Driscoll and Reiter maintained exclusive access to Banner, but eventually most farmers on the Pacific Coast had it. “There were no plant-patent laws,” Miles Reiter, a gentlemanly, white-haired man in his sixties, who studied history at Princeton, told me. “Ultimately, there was no way to keep it to yourself.”
The pursuit of new strawberry breeds was a hotly competitive area of agriculture—“The Small Fruits of New York,” published in 1925, lists more than a thousand varieties—but Mendel’s theory of genetics had only recently been rediscovered, and many promising varieties were created by chance pollination or dimly understood laws of reproduction. (One Cincinnati strawberry farmer briefly controlled ninety per cent of the market in his city because he had grasped that the variety he was planting required a particular approach to pollination, a sexual secret that the Cincinnati Horticultural Society devoted two years to investigating; its subsequent report drove down the price of berries and forced the farmer out of business.) An oddity of strawberry reproductive life made the fruit ideal for commercialization, and prone to theft. Strawberries are self-cloning; “mothers” send out runners, creating genetically identical “daughters.” This was also a problem in the fruit-tree business, where clones can be created by grafting, and in the first decades of the twentieth century nurserymen began to agitate for protection from copiers. One large Missouri nursery, the exclusive carrier of the Red Delicious apple, built a fence around its mother tree and asked buyers to sign contracts promising not to propagate. When that didn’t work, the nursery appealed to Congress. Thomas Edison sent a telegram supporting legislation, saying, “Nothing that Congress could do to help farming would be of greater value and permanence than to give to the plant breeder the same status as the mechanical and chemical inventors now have through the patent law.” The Plant Patent Act, which described breeders as inventors, passed in 1930, and became a cornerstone of intellectual-property law.
The Driscolls and the Reiters had enjoyed the advantages of controlling a breed, but, after a twenty-year run, Banner fell victim to “the yellows,” a viral infection spread by strawberry aphids. Looking for disease-resistant plants to cross into the Banner line, the plant-pathology department at the University of California at Berkeley began to collect germplasm. Under the guidance of Harold Thomas, a brilliant pathologist, and his talented field manager, Earl Goldsmith, the department established a breeding program, systematically inventing and releasing new strawberry varieties. The primary objective, according to a history by Henry Wallace, who served as the Secretary of Agriculture in the nineteen-thirties, was “a large, firm berry which could be picked one-fourth green and which could stand shipping to the east coast.”
The strawberry industry in the early twentieth century was dominated by Japanese immigrants, who represented not only the labor force but also some of the most experienced growers. In 1942, when the Japanese were forced into internment camps, the business effectively collapsed. According to the Reiters, Ned Driscoll, Dick’s son, was one of the few farmers still planting strawberries during the war, testing crosses invented by Thomas and Goldsmith. By the mid-forties, the university was making plans to suspend its strawberry-breeding program. Rather than accept reassignment, Thomas and Goldsmith quit the university and went to work for Ned.
Family lore has it that in 1944 Ned Driscoll and some grower friends pooled their gas rations and drove to the university plots to rescue the life’s work of Thomas and Goldsmith: untold thousands of strawberry seedlings, representing precious university germplasm. “We usually say that the launch of Driscoll’s was in 1944,” Miles Reiter told me. “That was initiated by the abandonment of the U.C. Berkeley breeding program. Which would have been lost otherwise.” Ned Driscoll appointed Goldsmith his breeder and Thomas the director of a new research institute, which later merged with an exclusive growers’ collective that Ned and his cousin Joe Reiter formed—the precursor to the modern Driscoll’s. (Family records indicate that the institute paid a thousand dollars for the germplasm, which was made available to other growers, too, but those other growers hadn’t hired Thomas and Goldsmith.) Herb Baum, the former Naturipe director, told me that the Reiter and Driscoll families were “smart enough to know, If we can get this material and have a monopoly, we’re going to make a fortune.”
In spite of what Thomas and Goldsmith, and the Driscolls and the Reiters, believed in 1944, the university did not abandon its breeding program. In 1945, the university, which presumably retained copies of plants that left the collection, released five new varieties, designed by Thomas and Goldsmith and named for the mountains and lakes of California. It moved its laboratories north from Berkeley to Davis, and hired breeders to take up where the others had left off. Under the new breeders, strawberries grew to be one of California’s most significant and lucrative crops. But, in the meantime, Driscoll’s had begun its ascent.
Developing successful cultivars from a set of potential parents depends on intuition, experience, sensibility, and luck, as much as it does on systematic data collection and dogged trial and error. With the university’s plants, the Driscolls and the Reiters gained access both to a rich and diverse source of genetic traits and to the expertise of the two men who had studied that source for decades. In 1946, Thomas and Goldsmith crossed two university varieties, only one of which was widely available, yielding what at first appeared to be an unimpressive plant of uncertain commercial value. In an account provided by Driscoll’s, Thomas writes that nevertheless Goldsmith “did recognize it as having a fruit character of excellent quality.” He and Goldsmith kept at it, testing and adjusting the growing regimen until they had “perhaps the finest commercial strawberry ever developed.” In 1958, they released it as Z5A, Driscoll’s first proprietary cultivar, a blockbuster berry that would prove momentous for the company. Z5A could withstand shipping; equally important, it fruited in the late summer and early fall, giving Driscoll’s berries in the months when other growers had none. With that, the company was on its way to becoming a grocery-store staple, a nationwide brand that markets could rely on enough to build display cases around.
The strapping, broad-shouldered modern strawberry that Driscoll’s exemplifies is the product of a cross between a Virginian male and a Chilean female that took place in France in the eighteenth century. The female was imported by a French Army intelligence officer, who, on a reconnaissance mission to South America, spotted the berry growing along the coast near Concepción; he described it as being as “big as a walnut, and sometimes as a hen’s egg, of a whitish red, and somewhat less delicious of taste than our Wood strawberries.” The Virginian was bright scarlet, and, according to an apothecary at Nuremberg who published a treatise on the medicinal garden there, “consistently large, the size of a plum, fleshy, and of an excellent flavor and fragrance.” The cross resulted in Fragaria x ananassa, whose pineapple-scented fruit an early taxonomist declared to be “monstrous,” in a good way.
As the cost of growing berries rises, Driscoll’s must find ways of enticing people to pay more for them. Recently, the company built a consumer lab equipped with a gas chromatograph and a gene-sequencing machine, so that the Joy Makers could begin to pick apart the scientific components of flavor and figure out how best to appeal to a public whose idea of “strawberry” is influenced by strawberry syrup and red Popsicles. Dillard, the brand strategist, dreams of a ten-dollar clamshell filled with splurge-worthy super-premium berries. Bjorn, the company’s president, says, “Consumers have to be more satisfied, or what we call more delighted, all the time.” Produce companies tend to be driven by supply: what they grow, they try to sell. Driscoll’s, conversely, sees itself as a consumer-products company. According to Bjorn, “We create the demand. It’s more like a Procter & Gamble.” Through the efforts of the Joy Makers, Driscoll’s is trying to do the equivalent of adding body-butter-enhanced shave-gel bars between razor blades.
One day at Cassin Ranch, Phil Stewart, the strawberry geneticist, took me into his greenhouse. Germplasm was everywhere: geriatric university stock; plants from a public seed bank maintained by the U.S.D.A.; others foraged by Driscoll’s employees on backpacking trips. In one corner, Stewart was running hydroponic tests on a cross between a Driscoll’s variety and Fragaria chiloensis, which was picked up on a beach in Santa Cruz. “The beach species is exceptionally tolerant of salt, because it evolved on sand dunes,” Stewart said—a compelling quality, because drought and fertilizers cause salts to accumulate in soil. To explore the limits of this capacity, he was growing a leathery, dark-green plant in a tub of heavily salted water. (An oversized jar of Morton salt sat nearby.) Half the plant’s leaves looked like potato chips, and its roots were a brown mess.
Deeper in the greenhouse, we came upon a droopy little berry that looked like a gnome hat felted by a Waldorf mom. It was a moschata, or musk strawberry, possibly the kind that Bosch supersized in “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” This particular variety, Mr. Zuks, was thought to have been grown by Thomas Jefferson; Stewart ordered it from a nursery that works with Monticello. (Based on Jefferson’s writings, Stewart believes that Jefferson got it from an Italian friend, who got it from a Pole.) The shelf life is pathetic—berries picked in the morning are trash by the afternoon—but it is strongly resistant to mildew. Even more interesting to the Joy Makers is its aromatic profile, which reflects an abundance of methyl anthranilate, an ester that is rarely found in cultivated varieties, and that calls to mind grape Jolly Ranchers (though it can also have a whiff of Gorgonzola).
Like much of what I saw in the greenhouse, Mr. Zuks was part of an intensive effort under way at Driscoll’s to recast the parameters of Fragaria x ananassa, established some three centuries ago. “You have a random event that happened in France that defined what we think of as the strawberry,” Judson Ward, a molecular biologist at Driscoll’s, said. “We’re going back to the wild and picking up new traits. We have people just as capable of identifying good flavors as whoever it was in France who happened upon that strawberry.” In the revision process, the company is deliberately reversing some of its own breeding biases, as mainstream consumers become increasingly interested in dainty shapes and offbeat tastes. Ward mentioned that Stewart had made a cross with a wild berry from Alaska. “It was like a fantasy of what people imagine picking wild strawberries is like,” Ward said. “They were all cute little things. Each one has a different flavor, so it is like that experience that people want to have in the wild.” Dillard added, “I think we have some packaging on that!”
The next day, I visited the consumer lab. It was spacious, consisting of two rooms, and had a determined-to-be-cheerful air, with an orange-painted wall and a whiteboard on which someone had doodled a picture of a raspberry plant over a diagram of a chemical compound. Michael Schwieterman, the biochemist, sat at a computer looking at an array of data from the gas chromatograph comparing commercially available Driscoll’s varieties with two old European Fragaria vescas, or wood strawberries: a moschata and a tiny, elegant French variety, Mara des Bois, popular among epicures.
“We can look at methyl anthranilate,” Schwieterman said, clicking onto a screen that described the aromatic as “sweet and fruity, Concord grapes, with musty and berry nuance.” He pointed to a graph that resembled a staircase. “In a commercial strawberry, there is practically none,” he said of the methyl anthranilate. (Only the Mara des Bois exhibited its presence.) “In those vescas, there’s a twenty-to-fifty-fold increase. In those moschatas, it’s through the roof.” Methyl anthranilate, he said, is “what potentially is different about wild strawberries and commercial strawberries. That’s why we have a lot of focus on it. French consumers really like Mara des Bois, and people like wild strawberries.”
On the next screen, Schwieterman showed me concentrations of gamma-Decalactone, which suggests “fruity, creamy, peach and apricot with a syrupy, fatty nuance.” In contrast to methyl anthranilate, it was highly prevalent in commercial varieties and scarce in wild ones. He explained that Driscoll’s and other breeders, liking the flavor, yet oblivious of the chemistry, had crossed it in. “It’s potentially an anthropomorphic artifact,” he said. Another compound, cinnamyl acetate, showed up in some of the berries. “Would that be good, if we planted a variety that had a cinnamon kind of flavor?” Schwieterman went on, “What about reconstructing a basil flavor in a strawberry? This species has one component that’s pretty important to basil, and one of our commercial species has another. What would happen if we introgressed that and got multiple compounds in a strawberry? You’d have a strawberry that’s going to taste great with your salad and balsamic dressing, because it has a nice basil undertone.” Driscoll’s hopes that its breeders can use this information to create new cultivars, producing strawberries as you would a track, dialling down the greasy peach and laying in some cinnamon and must, over a bass line of drought tolerance.
As the head of the strawberry-breeding program at Davis, Doug Shaw—effectively Driscoll’s chief rival—took a traditional approach, advancing the germplasm by stalking the fields to find the highest-yielding, best-looking, tastiest berries. Looking to the wild for exotic traits—that would be absurd. A formidable if cantankerous and territorial breeder, Shaw was loyal to the growers who depended on his cultivars and uninterested in working with proprietary companies like Driscoll’s. The program’s patented plants, grown by farmers in California and around the world, generated some hundred million dollars in revenue for the university. (As inventors, Shaw and Larson earned as much as two million dollars a year in royalties.) But, in 2011, as Shaw prepared for retirement, he began to worry that the university was shifting its focus from field work to the well-funded area of genomics. Where would the cultivars come from?
Like Thomas and Goldsmith before them, Shaw and Larson decided to leave the university for the private sector. Working with their superiors in the department of plant sciences, they proposed “spinning out” a breeding company “based in U.C. germplasm.” If the university was no longer interested in commercializing the germplasm, Shaw and Larson would be happy to make use of it. In particular, Shaw wanted access to the varieties that he had developed but had not yet released. “My motivation?” Shaw said. “I’d say it’s more ego than anything else. I want my cultivars to be used.” After his retirement, Shaw joined California Berry Cultivars, a new proprietary company that hopes to compete with Driscoll’s in the race to invent a superior berry. But in May, while the Joy Makers were eating berries in the sun, he stood accused in federal court in San Francisco of having stolen the university’s germplasm.
Shaw is sixty-three, with a rust-colored boot-brush mustache and a high bloom in his cheeks. His eyes, which he squints warily, are the color of gingerbread. He’s red-green color-blind, and tends to pick his berries by their sheen. “You’re looking at maybe the best place on earth for strawberries,” he told me in June, as we surveyed a field of strawberry plants at the headquarters of California Berry Cultivars, in Watsonville. Monterey cypresses stooped witchily, wind-bent; in the near distance, the Pacific Ocean was visible behind fog. “The soil is ninety-six per cent sand, and we get this fog that you’re seeing right here every day in the summer.” He dug his shoe into the soil, kicking up a flint-knapped arrowhead—he has a collection—and nodded toward a nearby building with a porch. “One of my favorite things to do is sit there and look out,” he said. Interestingly, C.B.C. had arranged to lease the same piece of land the university had once leased for its breeding program. Shaw knew it well, as did most of the people C.B.C. had hired to manage the fields and collect data; they were former Davis employees.
Shaw’s troubles began in 2013, when a strawberry research-and-marketing commission filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming that giving Shaw access to the germplasm would be “a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.” In May, Jane Fujishige Yada, a farmer who is a partner in C.B.C., testified that the commission’s lawyer had said that the lawsuit was intended to “prevent Doug Shaw from breeding again.” She went on, “At that point, I think I got my first inkling that our little C.B.C. company might be going up against a pretty big—pretty big five-hundred-pound gorilla in the industry.” In the months leading up to Shaw’s retirement, the university tried to get him to submit a patent for the unreleased cultivars, in order to assert its right to make use of Shaw’s intimate knowledge of the plants. Shaw refused.
A. G. Kawamura, a former state secretary of food and agriculture and a major grower who serves as the president of C.B.C., believes that the commission’s lawsuit originated with what he has described as “competitive angst” on the part of the proprietary companies. He told me, “The proprietary companies have an opportunity to benefit from no more competition from new and improved varieties.” When I broached the subject, the commission denied that Driscoll’s had influenced the lawsuit. Miles Reiter called the suggestion “totally fabricated.”
In 2016, frustrated that Shaw couldn’t get a license to breed with the cultivars, C.B.C. decided to sue the university, claiming that it had “risked the loss and destruction of the varieties, and has put them in a ‘black hole,’ ” suppressing competition and denying Shaw the benefit of his own inventions. What was at stake, C.B.C. said, was nothing less than the future of the strawberry industry. Without new cultivars, growers dependent on the university could not continue. Only Driscoll’s and a few other proprietary companies would survive. Fujishige Yada testified, “If anybody’s ever had a strawberry in California, it was probably created by Doug or Kirk. . . . My concern was that we wouldn’t have those new varieties in the pipeline to grow, as farmers.” To others, it just looked like history repeating itself. Baum, the retired strawberry executive, said, “If you make any kind of deal letting Shaw and that group have those materials, you are going to be doing the same thing that happened with the university and Driscoll’s, giving them the same kind of a hold that Driscoll’s had for fifty years. They could easily eclipse Driscoll’s.”
The university, in a countersuit, accused Shaw of illegally breeding with the pipeline cultivars on behalf of his new company, while still employed by Davis. Entrusted with the “crown jewels,” the university contended, Shaw had attempted to destroy the public breeding program in order to enrich himself and his friends. Steven Knapp is a genomics expert, formerly of Monsanto, who was hired as Davis’s new breeder. When I talked to him by phone not long ago, he was apoplectic at what he perceived to be Shaw’s breach of loyalty. “It’s one of the worst conspiracies I’ve ever seen by a faculty member,” he said. “They did it while they had the keys to the castle! They had the plants in their own hands.” Contrary to what C.B.C. had claimed, he said, the program was not dead. Knapp had sequenced the strawberry genome and secured a multimillion-dollar grant, and would be releasing new cultivars in the fall.
I was in the courtroom when the jury’s verdict came back, siding decisively with the university. A DNA expert from Yale had found that seedlings in C.B.C.’s field, crossed in Spain in 2014, had university parentage. After the verdict, I drove a couple of hours down to Watsonville to see Kyle VandenLangenberg, a young breeder at C.B.C., and Lucky Westwood, who works for a large shipper called California Giant Berry Farm, which is also a partner in the business. Whatever happened next in the legal battle with the university, Westwood said, “we don’t intend to stop.” (Settlement talks are under way.)
We walked around the field, filled with hybrids that Shaw had designed, including the contentious 2014 Spanish crosses. Those were in a legal limbo, and might need to be destroyed. The rulings and decisions, Shaw later wrote me, had created obstacles, but they were not insurmountable. “Long-term success will depend on what you know, not what you have,” he wrote. I.P., he seemed to be insisting, lives in the inventor’s head.
Westwood, however, wasn’t thinking about the Spanish crosses; he was looking for something else. “Is this the one?” he said.
“The one they can’t take away!” VandenLangenberg crowed when he came upon the right row. Like Shaw, who trained him, VandenLangenberg is color-blind. With help, he found a ripe berry, red and plump and nicely shaped. It looked like a commercial fruit—with luck, it would be available in five years—and, best of all, it had no U.C. parentage. I asked where it had come from. “We’re not going to talk about it,” VandenLangenberg said. The information was proprietary. ♦
