In this episode of “The Business of Blueberries,” host Kasey Cronquist, president of the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council (USHBC) and the North American Blueberry Council (NABC), is joined by Brandon Casteel, SPINS vice president of channel and retail partnerships, and Joe Vargas, USHBC/NABC director of business intelligence. Last year's attitudes and usage study found that growers and retailers could benefit from more detailed blueberry sales information. This led USHBC to make the strategic decision to switch from Nielson to SPINS data. With the new SPINS contract, USHBC gets an improved understanding of blueberry sales performance in grocery retail relative to other produce items by pack-size, by brand and measured by household buying rate and volume. 

“SPINS is a syndicated data provider. That's kind of fancy words for saying we track what is selling across hundreds of thousands of grocery stores all over the United States. … And then once we get that data, we're not done there, we add literally thousands of attributes on top of that information so that everyone can get smarter about what's on shelf, not just the retailers, but also the manufacturers, and then really everybody in the ecosystem.” - Brandon Casteel

 Topics covered include: 

• An introduction to Casteel and Vargas.
• A discussion of the value SPINS offers blueberry producers.
• An explanation of the added insights SPINS provides and details on how blueberry stakeholders can access the data. 

Crop Report

The Blueberry Crop Report is an update on crop conditions and markets throughout important blueberry growing areas. Today you’ll hear from Jason Smith in British Columbia, Pat Goin in Indiana, Broady Schropp in Michigan, TJ Hafner in Oregon, and Alan Schreiber in Washington. This was recorded on August 9, 2023.