Evans built a $64 million plant to sort, clean, and pack Cuties.
In 2004, “Cuties” debuted in stores (at least in the Western U.S. They agreed that the Resnicks would aggressively advertise and market the tiny oranges, as they’d done with pomegranates, while Evans would pack, sell, and distribute them. Instead of discord, Evans and Resnicks teamed up in 2001. They ran a massive pomegranate farm, which they used to produce Pom Wonderful juice, the first attempt at branding pomegranates in the U.S., and a massively successful one at that. Still, he hoped not to alienate any other farmers looking to get in on the mini-orange game, particularly Stewart and Linda Resnick.
The fruit sold very well on the West Coast in the early ‘90s, so well that in 1996 Evans hired a nursery to multiply clementine trees, and contractually forbade it from selling them to anyone else. After researching to see if the fruit could withstand the San Joaquin Valley’s weather extremes, he put almost everything he had into the new citrus fruit. He talked to some grocery executives, who asked if he could grow clementines to meet demand. Berne Evans, a farmer (and former stockbroker) was out a lot of his orange crop, but heard through industry sources that the hot new fruit on the East Coast was the clementine, a small, seedless, very sweet, easy to peel orange grown primarily in Spain. In 1990, an early freeze resulted in California’s citrus-growing San Joaquin Valley having one of its worst harvests ever. Oranges used to just be oranges…until Cuties came along and branded them.
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