If you’ve consumed a fruit beer or cider in the past few years, chances are you’ve sipped a concoction made with puree from Oregon Fruit Products (OFP), a Salem-based company that now has more than 500 brewery and cidery clients.
Since 1935, OFP has sold its signature canned fruit—like dark sweet cherries, red tart cherries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, plums, even gooseberries—on grocery store shelves. “It’s the same black iconic can that’s been on the shelf since 1935, so anybody’s great grandmother who used to bake a pie in 1936 is literally looking at an almost identical label today,” says CEO Chris Sarles.
Over the decades, OFP has become the leading processor of canned specialty fruit around the world. And they still reside in the same facility that was built when the company launched 80 years ago.
Expansion has taken OFP into new areas, including its Fruit in Hand line, which provides pourable purees to commercial enterprises like ice cream makers, coffee shops, frozen yogurt shops, bars, restaurants, and other food service companies. OFP has also started selling pourable purees in retail settings, where it’s sold frozen.
“It’s great for cocktails and cooking applications—yogurt, smoothies, pancakes, all sorts of things,” says Sarles. OFP also recently launched its popular red tart cherries packed in cherry juice and sold in glass jars.
Sarles says the company uses mostly Oregon-grown fruit. “Certain fruits are 100 percent Oregon grown,” he says. “And others aren’t because you can’t find, for instance, passion fruit in Oregon. But we try and buy whatever we can here.”
Another area of focus for Sarles has been working with more breweries and cideries. “When I came on about 15 or 16 months ago, we were doing some brewing business but it was really more filling orders as they came in and not actually going after it and targeting it,” Sarles says. “So that’s what we’ve done.”
OFP now works with more than 500 breweries, mostly in the United States, along with a handful in Canada and a client in Japan. One brewery is No-Li Brewhouse in Spokane, which produced its Mosh Pit Tart Cherry ale using OFP’s cranberry and cherry puree. Around 60 cideries are also customers, Sarles says.
As the craft beer industry continues to grow—and as more brewers think outside of the box when it comes to their brewing ingredients—Sarles predicts OFP will see more brewery business. But even now, the numbers are staggering: Sarles estimates that “OFP contributes to about 80,000 barrels of beer and 20 million pints of product around America.” That’s not bad for grandma’s favorite pie filling.
