The Van Trump Report

The Blueberry Billionaire… John Louis Bragg

John Louis Bragg had made four thousand dollars picking blueberries during his senior year in high school and he never forgot. John attended college and went to law school, but he left law school to go back home in hopes of buying into his Dad and brother’s small sawmill business. Keep in mind, the Bragg family has called Nova Scotia home for 180 years, so John had deep roots. Once he got back home, John went to work for his Dad and brother at the sawmill, but in an effort to make more money to invest and become a partner in the sawmill business, John went back to picking blueberries at night and on the weekends. 

It wasn’t too long thereafter John decided he wanted to farm blueberries for himself fulltime. In a bit of a twist, he used the money he had made from picking berries and working at the sawmill to purchase some land rather than investing in the family business. John had a couple of good years when he started, but in 1967, there was a huge crop in his part of Canada and a bumper crop harvested in Maine. This glut of supply made it difficult for John to find buyers to purchase his blueberries. 

At just 28 years old and with very little knowledge of the blueberry business, John decided to build his own small freezing plant. He told his father he wasn’t going to be held hostage again, and if prices weren’t strong at harvest, he would run the bulk of the crop through the freezing plant. He built his first factory to process and package an annual blueberry crop of two million pounds, which was way more than John could produce, so he went to all of his blueberry farming neighbors and told them his plan. He also told them if they would invest in an effort to help him build the plant they could also use the freezing facility for their crop when prices were low and there were no buyers in the cash market.  

Today, at the height of harvesting season, John’s two side-by-side factories, which are called Oxford Frozen Foods, handle over +4 million pounds of blueberries in a single day, twice the total amount John’s first plant could handle in an entire season. Not only does John continue to grow his own berries for processing, but he also now works with over +1,000 other growers in the Maritimes and Maine.

John remained the Chairman, President and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Oxford Frozen Foods, which he founded in 1968 and now operates the largest fruit farm in the world, with over +12,000 acres of wild blueberries, and today the business is still experiencing double-digit growth. In 2015, Bragg opened a new facility in Saint-Isidore, New Brunswick, that is considered to “the most modern blueberry processing facility in the world.” 

John Bragg wasn’t afraid to take risks and work hard. Today, he is the world’s largest supplier of wild blueberries and is estimated to have a net worth of over +$1.5 billion. I should note, John still lives in the Cape Cod-style house built in 1964 for himself and wife Judy, just across the road from the old white-frame house where he grew up.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *