This week's Economist has a short economic history of the cranberry: "Red, round and profitable" I grew up on Cape Cod - cranberry central - and never knew any of this stuff:
"...Cranberries really got going, metaphorically and literally, after the revolutionary war, when they became the American navy's equivalent of the British navy's lime. Kept in barrels on board ship, they provided the vitamin C to stave off scurvy on long voyages. Astute traders received up to $50 (about $750 in today's money) a barrel. The snag was that the suppliers had to depend on wild cranberries for their crop. They could not grow them...
...For nearly three decades, Ocean Spray [a growers' cooperative - Ben] grew slowly but steadily. Then, in the autumn of 1959, the American government announced that it had found pesticide residues in cranberry sauce��from berries produced in the Pacific north-west, not ours�, Ocean Spray officials are quick to add, even 50 years later. The scare passed quickly; tainted supplies were withdrawn and new inspections put in place. But sales were wiped out in November and December and, since few people ate cranberry sauce except at Thanksgiving and Christmas, Ocean Spray lost a year's sales.
For that reason, the company decided to create products that would sell all year. Juice was the obvious product to exploit. Ocean Spray wanted juice with a long shelf-life so that it would be easy for consumers to store and, more important, easy for the company to distribute...
The hard part of making fruit juice with a long shelf-life is not preventing spoilage�pasteurisation and packaging can deal with that�but preserving colour and appearance. Most fruit juices go a yucky brown when kept for more than a fortnight, and develop an off-putting sediment..."
You'll just have to read the article to find out whether or not Ocean Spray was able to solve the problem.