Blueberries are a favorite fruit for baby boomers and older millennials.

With younger millennials and Gen. Z consumers, not so much.

In a presentation at the Oregon Blueberry Conference in Salem on February 3, Brian Bocock, Chair of the United States Highbush Blueberry Council’s Promotion Committee, said that the blueberry industry is under performing with younger consumers.

“With baby boomers and older millennials, we’re on target,” he said. “With younger millennials and Gen. Z, we are way under indexing.”

“The boomer group and the older millennials are concerned with health, which is why we win with them,” Bocock said. “They got the message: blueberries are healthy.”

Brian Bocock

Bocock, a grower from Michigan, said the industry can build off that message by emphasizing that blueberries are more than just healthy, that they are easy to work into diets, colorful and tasty, messages that should resonate with boomers and younger buyers, alike.

The approach is one of several the USHBC could pursue to increase consumption, particularly given additional funding available under a proposed assessment increase. The USHBC is proposing to raise its assessment from $18 a ton to $36 a ton for fresh and $30 a ton for frozen blueberries.

One avenue the industry could take is to try and change blueberries from an impulse buy to a product on shopping lists. Today, according to a survey contracted by the USHBC, blueberries are largely an impulse buy. “Only 29 percent of the average buyer puts blueberries on the shopping list pre-shop,” Bocock said. “We want to get more of that. We want this 29 percent to go up.”

Blueberries also aren’t top of mind for most consumers, according to the survey, not like apples.

“Sixty-nine percent of the consumers listed apples,” Bocock said. “Blueberries are top of mind for only 2 percent of the consumers when they are going in to get their purchases for the week. And only 23 percent thought about blueberries at all.”

Another issue Bocock highlighted is that blueberries are consumed almost exclusively in the morning. “Most of us as consumers are putting blueberries on our cereals in the morning, our smoothies. It is all consumption per-lunchtime,” he said.

Only 2 to 4 percent of respondents said they consumed blueberries in the evening. “That means people like me and others like me, we’re going for chips, we’re going for lots of other things at night. But we’re certainly not eating something super healthy for us during the nighttime period, which is what we should be doing.”

“Sixty-nine percent of the consumers primarily consume blueberries as an ingredient or topping, which limits high volumes. When you add an ingredient, a topping, you just sprinkle them on top, you might get half a handful.” Brian Bocock

Another issue the industry could address in promotional campaigns involves increasing per-usage volume. “Sixty-nine percent of the consumers primarily consume blueberries as an ingredient or topping, which limits high volumes,” Bocock said. “When you add an ingredient, a topping, you just sprinkle them on top, you might get half a handful.”

If the USDA approves the assessment increase, Bocock said the promotions budget for the USHBC would increase to nearly $20 and the social media budget will increase from its current $4 million to $10 million. The additional social media budget could be used for placing ads on television, on radio and in podcasts, and to improve social media takeover and placement. In addition the budget could be used to increase blueberry’s presence with popular influencers, to pay for pitches from celebrity spokespeople, and for prime placement during big events like March Madness.

The balance of the increased funding will allow for increases in health-related research, better food-service penetration and better ingredient/manufacturing penetration, he said.

“With today’s budget, we cannot effectively reach as many areas as we need to,” Bocock said.

USHBC promotion campaigns currently reach about 15 million households, Bocock added. “With the increase, we feel we can reach 30 million U.S. households and bring the average per capita consumer up to 7.2 pounds per person (up from its current rate of 6 pounds per person). By doing that, we think we will have an active influence on an additional 216 million pounds of blueberry consumption in the U.S.”