Around 15 years ago, executives from the California berry grower Driscoll’s flew to China with a plan to make blueberries the country’s next food fad, the Wall Street Journal reported in September 2026. Few people there ate the fruit at the time.
The company sent one of its experts to look at farmland in Yunnan province, in the southwest. It signed contracts with global blueberry-genetics firms to secure the best varieties, and it imported high-tech growing methods to produce the fruit at scale. By 2020 it was supplying Chinese supermarkets with thousands of tons.
Copycats arrive
Then the competition showed up. As stories of blueberry fortunes spread, Chinese entrepreneurs put up farms of their own, the Journal said. They used similar high-tech techniques and, allegedly, copied greenhouse designs used by growers supplying Driscoll’s. A Chinese court has ruled that they also took the company’s patent-protected varieties. State banks fed the boom with a special category of loans for blueberry growers.
Entrepreneur, summarizing the Journal’s report, said Driscoll’s has filed more than 20 lawsuits against Chinese companies accused of taking its greenhouse designs and its plants. It put the number of illegal hectares of blueberry farmland across China in the thousands, with more likely to come.
How the plants walk
Taking a licensed plant is not hard, according to the Journal: grab cuttings, replant them. Planasa, a Spanish berry company, hired private investigators to catch another Chinese firm doing exactly that, and got the firm to admit it had covertly taken the plant.
Driscoll’s has not left China. It is continuing its operations there while pressing harder on intellectual property protection in Chinese courts. And because so many Chinese companies and individual farmers already hold various berry varieties, Western breeders are now looking at letting them obtain official licenses, in order to collect royalties.
Sources
- Driscoll’s Gave China Its Blueberries—Then China Swiped the Secret to Growing Them – WSJ
- Driscoll's Says China Stole Its Berry Secrets – Entrepreneur (summarizing the WSJ report)
