Trisha and I meet up in one of the breakrooms on the Harry & David campus that happens to have not only a ping-pong table and a karaoke machine, but a foosball table as well. As soon as we start talking, an intense (and loud) game of foosball begins and we’re forced outside. It’s only then that I realize what a beautiful day it is and our interview takes a breezy, relaxed turn.

Sitting at a table in the shade, Trisha tells me about her background. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts and was still living in San Francisco when she started working with Harry & David. She came up to do consulting work from time to time, but after a while it became clear that this was a good fit. Next May will mark a decade since she decided to move north and make it permanent.

It’s kind of rare for an artist to enjoy the technical aspects of a job as well as the creative, but Trisha does. Talking to the prepress guys, doing press checks and working with the printer all add variety to what she does. The artistic element is what she enjoys most, but she feels good about working with her team and creating something beautiful and unique that also makes sense for the company.

Her job is not an easy one. She has to reinterpret the same holidays, time and again, following trends and finding new inspiration anywhere she can. It’s tough to make each season seem fresh and meaningful. Trisha starts sketching by hand, but designs on the computer as well. Once she’s done, her designs will decorate all kinds of deliciousness, from Halloween gift bags to holiday gift towers.

Not many artists get to walk into a store and say, “I painted that.” She does. Combining different ideas is a bit like designing pieces that have to live side by side. It’s important that all the ideas, colors and patterns come together to transform a simple package into a special gift. That’s when Trisha can finally sit and relax in her garden, watching the sunset with a glass of wine and breathing a sigh of relief. For now. Another holiday is right around the corner.

The post Sketching by Hand appeared first on Field Notes.

When Connie started her job some 31 years ago, the bakery was making Baklava, Cinnamon Swirl and Traditional Fruitcake, which are all around to this day. Although a lot has changed since she started, some things have stayed the same. The recipe for the fruitcake is still top secret. It doesn’t get written down, it gets passed down from person to person. I try to get her to pass it on to me, but she says I couldn’t even offer her my first born for it. I’ll have to think of a better bribe. I know she loves Root Beer Float Moose Munch® Popcorn and Hoot-N-Holler Spicy Trail Mix.

Connie has developed a lot of recipes over the years, but she’s most proud of the Morning Bread. She digs deep through her recipe files, looking for the award certificate from Cooks Illustrated that it won. It has an orange brandy sauce and somehow Grand Marnier is involved. Yum. They just happen to be making it in the bakery and I can see each cake being frosted by hand. Since they don’t let anybody onto the floor anymore I can’t get as close as I’d like to. It’s probably safer this way since I’d be tempted to sneak a taste.

People still tour the bakery and candy kitchen, but they now have to ooh and ah from behind a wall of glass. Connie remembers working on the floor with the tours coming by. A little boy came by one day and she held up the enormous batter vat in front of him, and asked, “do you want to lick the bowl?” She laughs and tells me how his eyes bugged out.

You can tell she loves her job, but I ask her if there’s anything that drives her crazy. She tells me how it took 160 rounds to perfect Moose Munch® Popcorn, about the day the chocolate kettle boiled over, and about the trouble with grandmas.

All grandmas have a different recipe for pumpkin pie. Connie tells me this is what makes the Deep Dish Pumpkin Pie the most difficult thing they have ever had to develop in the bakery, because trying to get a bunch of people to agree on what the perfect pumpkin pie tastes like is nearly impossible. I say nearly because they eventually came up with a recipe that everyone could agree was as good as grandma would make. Phew.

It’s clear that as fun as her job is, there is nothing easy about pie.

The post Top Secret Fruitcake appeared first on Field Notes.

I decided to take an official tour of our candy kitchen to see how this Moose Munch® Popcorn business is done.

First of all, I’ve never seen so much popcorn in my life. Enormous steel vats are filled with the kernels, and I learn we use three different shapes to create that ideal crunch. They then pour gallons of gooey, delicious looking caramel into the mixture, add a blend of nuts and then add the chocolate for certain batches.

It truly looks like something out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. And I might even be more impressed than the 10 year olds on the tour.

After the tour I sit down with our head chocolatier, Charlie Douglass, to get the scoop on the history of Moose Munch® Popcorn.

He explains that the day they produced their first successful batch of Moose Munch® Popcorn in the late ’90s was one of his favorite days at Harry & David. They loved caramel corn. But wanted to put a spin on it. This recipe had been in the works for a long time. They even had to fly down to Dallas, Texas, to test out some industrial equipment, which they eventually shipped to Southern Oregon once they dialed down the Moose Munch® Popcorn recipe.

Playing inventor and being a part of the Moose Munch® Popcorn process was definitely a perk to Charlie’s already awesome job.

With over 15 Moose Munch® Popcorn flavors on shelves already, I ask Charlie what new flavors he has in mind to try out next. I should’ve seen it coming as he shakes a finger at me. “Top secret,” he says.

The post No Ordinary Caramel Popcorn appeared first on Field Notes.

It was originally known as the “Box of the Month”. And it consisted of Royal Riviera® Pears, Oregold® Peaches and Golden Delicious apples. I recently visited our one of our Oregold® Peach orchards outside of Talent, Oregon, only about 10 minutes from our offices. I asked Matt Borman, our head of orchard operations, how on earth peaches could grow in mild Southern Oregon. I thought peaches needed the hot hot sun of California or Georgia to get big and Juicy. “Well,” he says to me, “that’s exactly why ours are so much better”. I couldn’t help but add a “duh” to the end of his answer.

In 1937, it was renamed the “Rare Fruit Club” and that’s when Harry and David started to search the globe for unusual fruit. Like kiwis. Yup. That’s when kiwis were unusual. Coming from remote Southern Oregon, where some of the best fruit grows, the brothers had high standards for the fruit they sourced from the very beginning. So high in fact, that they had to create a revolutionary way to ship the fruit across the country. By airplane. Yup. That’s when airplanes were revolutionary. And they even won an award from United Air Lines Inc. for being the first ones to use an airplane for shipping perishables.

Seventy six years ago, fresh fruit delivered to your doorstep each month was a new idea. So were kiwis. So were airplanes. A lot has changed since then. But people still like to send each other fruit. So we continue to do it the old fashioned way. Searching the globe for the growers that do things like we do. Grow awesome fruit and do whatever it takes to get it to you. Like privately flying in pineapples from Hawaii during a shipping strike. Yup. Harry and David actually did that. They didn’t want to disappoint their customers. Duh.

The post Fresh Fruit. The Old Fashioned Way appeared first on Field Notes.

The air smells like warm brown sugar. Or rich dark chocolate. Or something equally as sweet and delicious that I just can’t pinpoint. But I focus less on figuring out what the smell is and more on where it’s coming from and if I can try whatever it is. Turns out Charlie is just whipping up a batch of our chocolate cherries, which happen to be my all time favorite.

A signature product, our chocolate cherries have been a favorite for years. Charlie dips our gourmet cherries in a chocolate blend from Guittard Chocolate, a top chocolate producer. Guittard uses all natural ingredients, like pure cane sugar, real vanilla beans and full cream milk in the case of milk chocolate. So I feel just a tad better about indulging in the treat.

As a chocolatier, Charlie spends a lot of his time experimenting and taste testing new treats in the candy kitchen (um, where do I apply?) but the recipes for our legacy chocolate products like our chocolate truffles never change. And I understand why. When something is so good, why would you change it?

I learned that chocolate is pretty much genetic for Charlie. His family has a chocolate shop that’s been around for over 90 years. He’s apprenticed with a Swiss candy maker and attended a French pastry school. Bottom line is, Charlie knows his candy. Whether it’s developing a new chocolate bark or making fruit filled chocolate treats, he’s always got his hands full. Working on a recipe is almost like detective work, he says. You have to keep experimenting until you figure out what that missing ingredient is.

I think how most of us probably drooled over the idea of being a candy maker when we were kids. And around here, there’s a general consensus that Charlie pretty much has the ultimate dream job.

The post Charlie in Our Chocolate Factory appeared first on Field Notes.

“We don’t actually pick the pears when they’re ripe,” Matt explains. They wait for the pressure to be right. He tells us they use a device called a penetrometer to test some 4,500 pears. The test reveals the fruit’s firmness and level of maturity, and when it reaches the desired ten to 13 pounds of pressure the harvest can begin. Since we don’t get to see the device in action I do a quick image search when we get back from our field trip. A penetrometer sort of looks like a stopwatch with an arm that extends out to meet the fruit. I still don’t totally understand how it works, but I get the part that it’s harvest time. Yay!

Matt tells us that picking pears while balancing on a ladder and wearing a 40-pound bucket is no easy feat. I don’t doubt it. I hate getting on a ladder to change the light bulb in the hallway. The stems have to stay on, so pickers have to gently twist the pears at just the right angle. After that, they’re carefully placed in bins on their sides so the stems don’t poke the flesh of the other pears. This is some high-maintenance fruit. It takes a special combination of skilled people with infinite patience and modern equipment to make sure that pears arrive in perfect condition. This is all to ensure that when someone bites into a sweet, juicy Royal Riviera® Pear they are blown away. People don’t need to know all that goes into creating awesome fruit to be able to enjoy it.

The post All For The Perfect Pear appeared first on Field Notes.

Hope likes to pack big baskets, the more challenging the better. Which basket is the most difficult? According to Maria, it’s the #8. I pry for more information, ask if the #8 has a name, but no. She insists that’s what it’s called, and it’s not until later that I figure out that what she’s referring to is the Roxy Ann Gift Basket Deluxe, a monster at over 8 pounds. Gloria tells me the hardest basket to pack is not the #8, it’s something called “the 5000,” which is later revealed to be the Crater Lake Gift Basket. Since I know we have even bigger baskets that weigh something like 30 pounds, it seems weight alone doesn’t make one basket harder to load up with goodies than another.

The off-season is the only time Maria packs. When it’s crazy busy, in October through December, she trains seasonal employees. All the baskets are filled carefully by hand to supply the endless stream of holiday orders. She trains packers to measure the fruit so they know where to put those enormous pears. Helps them figure out how to protect their hands by wrapping up their fingers in little bandages. Teaches them how to tape down the pears wrapped in gold, which are pretty, but also eager to jump out of those baskets, and a pear that has fallen on the ground is not going to make the cut. She shows them how to stuff hay in the baskets to keep things from moving around. Because everything has to be nice and neat when it arrives at someone’s door.

So after decades of packing pears into baskets I ask them if they still like eating this famous fruit. They all give an enthusiastic yes. Hope uses them to make pear bread. Gloria eats them fresh. How does Maria eat a pear? She tells me I’m not going to believe it. She cuts the pear into slices and then adds lime, salt and chili.

“They taste really good,” she swears. And I believe her. I’ll have to try it for myself.

The post Fast Packing Sisters appeared first on Field Notes.