The pomegranate is family tree for budding botanist
LOS ANGELES — The first pomegranate that John Chater grasped bled crimson drops onto his tan suede shoes.
The leathery hull brimmed with dark, translucent seeds bigger than his baby teeth, and when he nibbled them they burst with a sweetness his toddler tongue had never experienced.
After that, no other fruit proffered by his Lebanese grandfather would do. Not his sweet loquats. Not his tart Persian mulberries, carefully tended in a quarteracre backyard in Camarillo.
“Every time I’d go to my grandfather’s house to visit, I would ask for them,” said Chater, 34, “Because I didn’t understand seasonality back then.”
Chater understands seasonality now in ways that go beyond botany.
A doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside’s Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, Chater is cultivating and studying the same pomegranates his grandfather once grew.
Sassin John Chater, it turns out, is responsible for at least a dozen novel types of pomegranate that are loved by the discerning few but remain rare to this day, abandoned in favor of a single variety that goes onto most produce shelves in the U.S., and into juices such as Pom Wonderful.
John Chater, the grandson, is out to change that.
Chater is up against history and billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, whose nut and citrus empire sprawls across 125,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley.
The U.S. grows about 33,000 acres of pomegranates, nearly all of it the variety called “wonderful,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Resnicks own more than a quarter of that acreage, squeezing most of what it bears into hourglassshaped bottles of Pom Wonderful juice.
The wonderful cultivar has become so central to the Resnicks that they renamed their $4.8 billion holding company, Roll Global, to Wonderful Co. in 2015 and rebranded their packaged nuts and trademarked clementines with the same adjective.
How wonderful rose to prominence, and how the Resnicks came to dominate its cultivation, is a product of chance and savvy marketing.
While some pomegranate trees probably arrived with Spanish missionaries, the wonderful variety was brought here by a man known to history only as “Mr. Baers of Porterville,” who obtained a cutting from Florida in 1896. Within a couple of decades, wonderful was to pomegranates what the Washington navel was to oranges. It has dominated the U.S. market ever since, and has made inroads in Europe and Israel.
If Stewart Resnick had listened to his farm managers, he would have torn out the first 100 acres of wonderful pomegranates that he belatedly realized were part of his 1987 purchase of a pistachio orchard, Lynda Resnick said. Convinced the rare fruit had a higher profit margin than pistachios, Resnick instead planted thousands of additional acres in the ensuing decade — even though marketing reports showed barely 1 in 20 U.S. consumers had ever tried one.
“We weren’t exactly responding to pent-up demand,” Lynda Resnick wrote in her memoir, “Rubies in the Orchard.”
The Resnicks created a market much the way citrus growers dealt with an orange glut in the 1940s: by promising that drinking their fruit juice would extend life spans.
In 2002, the newly launched Pom Wonderful boasted that consumers could “cheat death” with pomegranate juice, loaded with antioxidants. Five years later, the company was bringing in a reported $165 million in revenue — and drawing rebuke from federal regulators. The company has since toned down its claims.
Pom Wonderful is in no hurry to expand beyond the variety that gave the company its name. While the company regularly experiments with other cultivars each year, none match the taste, look, durability and consumer appeal of the original, said Erik Wilkins, the beverage company’s director of crop research.
“We’ve screened some of the material from Mr. Chater,” Wilkins said. “If you try to make pomegranate juice from the kinds of lines that John Chater’s grandfather had over in Camarillo, it has different flavors to it, definitely, but it’s not the traditional flavor that we have from wonderful — it’s still the gold standard.”
Wonderful, he added, “has been part of the California agricultural landscape for over 120 years.”
Sassin Chater wasn’t trying to create the premiere pomegranate. He was honoring memory.
For generations, the Chater family had tended orchards near Beirut, Lebanon, growing olives and other fruit. But pomegranate varieties often don’t adapt well — most thrive better in hot, dry climates of the Middle East and Asia, and will split open or produce bitter arils in the cool and moist Mediterranean climate of Ventura County.