Inside Driscoll’s Berry Strange Case of Corporate Espionage: How China Stole Its Secrets
Fifteen years after Driscoll’s introduced its blueberries to China, the company claims farmers stole their growing methods, plants and profits.
Giant fruit grower Driscoll’s is blue in the face over what it calls outright blueberry theft. Fifteen years after the company brought its blueberries to China, it’s filed over 20 lawsuits against Chinese companies accused of stealing greenhouse designs and the plants themselves, which are proprietary. It’s estimated that there are thousands of illegal hectares of blueberry farmland across the country, with thousands more likely to spring up.
Stealing a licensed blueberry plant is not very difficult, according to The Wall Street Journal. It just requires nabbing plant cuttings and replanting them. Planasa, a Spanish western berry company, used private investigators to catch another Chinese company using this method and got them to admit to covertly taking the plant.
Driscoll’s is continuing official operations in China, but is pushing intellectual property protection harder in Chinese courts. Additionally, because so many Chinese companies and individual farmers already have access to different varieties of berries, Western blueberry-genetics farmers are now looking to let them obtain official licenses to recoup royalties.
To sum it all up, it’s not exactly a sweet time to be in the Chinese blueberry business.
Giant fruit grower Driscoll’s is blue in the face over what it calls outright blueberry theft. Fifteen years after the company brought its blueberries to China, it’s filed over 20 lawsuits against Chinese companies accused of stealing greenhouse designs and the plants themselves, which are proprietary. It’s estimated that there are thousands of illegal hectares of blueberry farmland across the country, with thousands more likely to spring up.
Stealing a licensed blueberry plant is not very difficult, according to The Wall Street Journal. It just requires nabbing plant cuttings and replanting them. Planasa, a Spanish western berry company, used private investigators to catch another Chinese company using this method and got them to admit to covertly taking the plant.
Driscoll’s is continuing official operations in China, but is pushing intellectual property protection harder in Chinese courts. Additionally, because so many Chinese companies and individual farmers already have access to different varieties of berries, Western blueberry-genetics farmers are now looking to let them obtain official licenses to recoup royalties.
To sum it all up, it’s not exactly a sweet time to be in the Chinese blueberry business.
