Stemilt, Pepin Heights Team Up to Market Apples

Two companies, each experts in apple marketing, growing, packing and shipping, are combining their similar backgrounds and separate expertise to promote apple varieties, including Honeycrisp.

Stemilt, based in Wenatchee, Wash., and Pepin Heights Orchards, located in Lake City, Minn., created the product marketing alliance in October after a contingent from Stemilt traveled to Minnesota to meet the Pepin Heights management team and tour the company’s orchards and packinghouse.

Stemilt Marketing Director Roger Pepperl, who visited Pepin Heights with the group, said the product marketing alliance is a unique partnership, capitalizing on each company’s similar history and maximizing the unique strengths each company has to offer.

Both Stemilt and Pepin Heights have deep roots in the tree fruit industry. Stemilt is owned by the Mathison family and headed by Executive Vice President West Mathison, grandson of Tom Mathison, who founded Stemilt in 1960.

Tom Mathison’s great-grandparents planted some of the area’s first fruit orchards in the early 1900s on Stemilt Hill overlooking Wenatchee. Mathison built the family’s first fruit packinghouse in 1960, and he and his family continue to farm and manage Stemilt. The company now owns five packinghouses in the Wenatchee area and one in Stockton, Calif.

In 1949, Gil and Evelyn Courtier started planting the beginnings of what was to become Pepin Heights Orchards. Dennis Courtier, current CEO and owner, bought the family farm in 1978 with plans for significant expansion. Since then, internal acreage has been added, outside growers included, storage and packing capacity increased and fresh pressed and sparkling apple cider product lines developed.

While Stemilt is known for being a significant packer-shipper of many of the nation’s leading apple varieties and the leading organic fruit shipper in Washington, Pepin Heights is best known as one of the Midwest’s largest producers of Honeycrisp and a major shipper of high culinary varieties. Pepin Heights provides upper-end retailers with unique apples such as Fireside and Sweet 16, a variety the company owns. Pepin Heights also ships Cortland, McIntosh and Haralson apples.

Pepperl said the marketing alliance currently is focused on Honeycrisp. The apple was introduced by the University of Minnesota’s apple breeding program in 1991 and has gained rapid popularity in recent years. It’s a large apple with an aromatic scent and a sweet-tart flavor. About 70 acres of Pepin Heights’ own orchards are planted to this variety, and the company has a thriving business marketing, packing and shipping Honeycrisp from growers in five states and two Canadian provinces.

“Stemilt will have Honeycrisp coming into production in the upcoming seasons,”Pepperl said. “We are very excited about the future of this variety and are looking forward to working with Pepin Heights because they are experts in Honeycrisp.”

Pepperl said the marketing alliance will be a national program to push Honeycrisp domestically. In the future, Stemilt and Pepin Heights will likely work together to promote other niche varieties. Stemilt has apple varieties it owns and a “huge interest”in target marketing unique fruit varieties, Pepperl said.

“We’re tapping into our similar backgrounds and our shared vision but capitalizing on our separate expertise to help elevate both companies and achieve our goals,”he said.