The sweet taste of success - marketing the Minneola tangelo

Nation's Business, March, 1988 by Del Marth

The Sweet Taste Of Success

"Frankly, our customers forced us into this business," says Allen Cushman, president of Cushman Fruit Company in West Palm Beach, Fla. He is speaking of his firm's mail-order marketing of the fruit it calls a "HoneyBell."

The customers did it, he says, by writing testimonials: "Like Pavlov's dog, when someone holds a Cushman HoneyBell before my eyes I begin to salivate."

A fiery red, bell-shaped citrus, the Cushman HoneyBell is an exceptionally sweet and juicy tangelo, a delicious cross between Florida's tastiest grapefruit, the Duncan, and the state's most succulent tangelo, the Dancy.

In January, as the HoneyBells matured and were picked, Cushman Fruit shipped 1.8 million of them in 50,000 gift boxes.

Back in the 1970s, Cushman's annual sales of fruit of all kinds hovered around $400,000, and only 10 percent was from mail orders. Last year, sales hit $4 million, with 60 percent from the mail. Well over half of that mail-order business was in HoneyBells.

"It goes to show you how long it takes sometimes for a good thing to catch on," Cushman says. "After all, the HoneyBell has been around more than 70 years."

But not as the HoneyBell. In the citrus industry, it is known as the Minneola tangelo, and has been since 1911, when the cross was created by government researchers. Because its trees are inconsistent producers, the Minneola tangelo has remained a minor citrus.

So minor, in fact, that the late Ed Cushman did not recognize the fruit when he found a few bushels in harvest of pink grapefruit from a grower who supplied his retail store. Says his son Allen: "My dad asked, 'What the devil are these?' and bit into one. It was as sweet as honey, and right then they became 'HoneyBells.'"

After Ed Cushman died in 1972, his three sons, Allen, Mike and John, took over the firm. They began seeking out growers who produced a high-quality tangelo. Working in concert--Allen, 49, handles marketing, Mike, 47, harvesting and buying, and John, 43, packing and shipping--the brothers have built Cushman Fruit into the second-largest of Florida's 120 figt-fruit shippers.

Other fruit shippers "just have not grasped the potential" of the Minneola tangelo, Allen Cushman says. The Cushmans have tried to enhance that potential, by being highly selective about the fruit they ship and giving it a trademarked name.

"And we eagerly accept our customers' advice," Allen says, referring to a letter from one perennial HoneyBell eater who wrote that the Cushman fruit was so juicy that he needed a bib unless he ate it in the bathtub.

"So," says Allen, "with every box of HoneyBells we now enclose bibs."

Photo: The Cushman brothers--from left, John, Mike and Allen--have made their HoneyBell tangelo the mainstay of a $4 million retail and mail-order operation.