The Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company (PWBC) has been awarded over $1.76 million in a lawsuit against Cherryfield Foods Inc. and its parent company, Oxford Frozen Foods Ltd., following a jury trial by the Maine Business and Consumer Court in Portland. In a May 20 decision, the jury awarded the amount based on Cherryfield Foods' failing to purchase the tribal company's blueberry harvest in 2017, as required by contract, and breaching the sales-based price provision of the blueberry purchase agreement in 2014 and 2015. Cherryfield Foods has filed a post-trial motion for a review of the amount of the award.
     Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry had not been able to harvest its crop in 2017 after Cherryfield Foods told the company it would not be purchasing the berries. Because PWBC had a contract since 1989 with Cherryfield Foods for the purchasing of the berries, it sued for breach of contract.
In a release, Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry states, "This lost year was devastating to the company and occurred at a difficult moment for the Maine wild blueberry industry as a whole." The company is pleased with the jury's verdict, stating that it "recognized the significant damages to the company caused by the lost harvest in 2017 and the fact that Cherryfield had failed to pay the company what it should have in two prior years."
     "Although the award cures some of the harm done to the company, it will never compensate for the inability of the company to fulfill a key mission during the 2017 harvest season: provide jobs and income to tribal members. The opportunity for our community to gather together in the summer of 2017, as it has for decades, and communally harvest what the company works hard to produce was also lost."
     The statement adds that the company "is eager to get back to its real job: growing and harvesting Maine wild blueberries. We can now focus on carrying on our true mission to provide income and jobs to the Passamaquoddy Tribe. The company is working hard on its upcoming crop and hopes to produce the same high-quality Maine wild blueberries as it has in the past."
     While PWBC is pleased with the amount awarded, in an initial ruling in June 2017 to allow the lawsuit to proceed, Justice Michaela Murphy of the court had found that it was more than likely that the company would be awarded over $12 million. However, that estimate was based on a breach of contract for the four years from 2017 through 2020. Cherryfield Foods, though, did purchase PWBC's blueberries in 2018 and will do so in 2019 and 2020. The trial ended up being only about the loss of the 2017 crop.
     According to court documents, Cherryfield Foods had pointed to the oversupply of wild blueberries in the market, and the company says it had notified PWBC in a September 2016 letter of its intent to terminate the contract.
     The market glut had not only depressed prices significantly but left the tribe with no place to sell its berries. Because of the oversupply of unsold blueberries from past harvests being held by processors in freezers, no other processors in the region would buy the tribe's blueberries for the 2017 season. The tribe then decided not to harvest over 1,000 acres of fields centered around Columbia Falls, leaving rakers without that extra income that they depend on every year. If the tribe had harvested its fields but been unable to sell them, PWBC would have been left bankrupt, according to a letter that Brian Altvater, president of the board of PWBC, wrote at the time.
     Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry has over 2,000 acres of blueberries in Columbia Falls, Columbia, Centerville and Township 19, with half of the fields harvested each year. The tribe hires about 600 rakers for each season, which lasts two to three weeks in August. Along with tribal members, local residents and many Micmacs from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia rake the fields, earning extra income to buy school clothes or pay for other household costs.
     The tribe was not the only one hurt by the oversupply that year, with a number of small blueberry growers having had their berries refused by buyers. Some growers then scaled back on costs, cutting back on the number of bees for pollination to the minimum number and using less spray for pests. A number of growers, though, simply stopped harvesting altogether. It's estimated that the industry in Maine has shrunk from about 900 growers to less than half that, with processors having consolidated and a number of them owned by multinational corporations.
     The market glut has been caused by increasing production, with Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI all having ramped up their harvests. Also, there has been a significant growth in cultivated blueberry production. The result was a drastic lowering of prices, with the price of frozen wild blueberries having dropped in 2017 below the cost of production by as much as 60% during the previous five years, creating an unsustainable situation for Maine growers. Prices paid to growers have dropped over the years from $1 per pound to 30 cents a pound in 2018.