About 15 years ago, California-based Driscoll’s entered China with an ambitious plan: transform blueberries from a relatively unfamiliar fruit into a mass-market favorite. The company succeeded spectacularly—but that success also helped create a powerful Chinese industry that would eventually become one of its fiercest competitors.
Driscoll’s focused its expansion on Yunnan province, where sunny days and cool nights offered favorable conditions for berry production. Because local soil and water conditions created difficulties, the company introduced sophisticated agricultural techniques, including greenhouse cultivation, coconut-fiber growing media, filtered water and precision drip irrigation.
It also secured access to premium blueberry genetics. Among the important varieties was Eureka Sunrise, developed by Australian genetics company Mountain Blue and licensed for Driscoll’s use in China.
The investment worked.
By 2020, Driscoll’s was producing thousands of tons of blueberries for Chinese supermarkets. It eventually partnered with more than 150 growers in Yunnan, producing approximately 30,000 metric tons annually.
Chinese consumers enthusiastically embraced the fruit. Blueberries gained a reputation as a healthy premium food, while restaurants and beverage companies incorporated them into desserts, drinks and other products.
Then competitors flooded the market.
Chinese entrepreneurs saw the profits being generated and rapidly established their own blueberry farms. Large agricultural companies entered the sector, while state-backed banks provided financing that helped growers expand quickly.
Some competitors legitimately adopted modern agricultural technologies. But Driscoll’s and other international berry companies also discovered what they alleged were unauthorized copies of proprietary plant varieties and growing systems.
The intellectual-property problem became serious enough that Western companies began using undercover investigators.
Investigators posing as farmers or traders purchased suspicious plants from nurseries and sent them for DNA testing. In one case involving another genetics company, evidence presented in Chinese court showed that a nursery had secretly obtained cuttings of the protected Eureka Sunrise variety from a Driscoll’s farm. A court concluded that protected plants had been grown illegally and ordered their destruction.
Driscoll’s has filed more than 20 lawsuits against companies in China, according to former CEO Soren Bjorn, winning two of those cases.
But enforcement has become increasingly difficult. Industry groups warn that unauthorized nurseries and plantings have become so widespread that thousands of hectares of potentially illegal blueberry production could remain in operation.
Meanwhile, China’s production has exploded.
Blueberry output has increased roughly 25-fold since 2010. China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest blueberry producer in 2021, and by 2025 was producing approximately twice the U.S. volume.
The expansion has been excellent for consumers but increasingly difficult for growers.
Massive supply pushed prices sharply downward. In Yunnan, one producer said blueberry prices fell from about $45 per kilogram in 2021 to roughly $15 this year. What was once promoted as an extraordinarily profitable agricultural opportunity has become a fiercely competitive market.
Chinese media has celebrated the result as “blueberry freedom”—a situation in which a fruit once considered expensive and exotic has become affordable to ordinary consumers.
For Driscoll’s, however, the experience illustrates a broader challenge confronting foreign companies operating in China.
International businesses can introduce products, technologies and business models that help create enormous new markets. But once those markets demonstrate their profitability, local competitors can move extraordinarily quickly, supported by domestic supply chains, financing and massive manufacturing or agricultural capacity.
The resulting competition can produce what China increasingly describes as “involution”: companies rush into promising industries, capacity expands faster than demand and aggressive price wars destroy profit margins.
Similar dynamics have challenged foreign businesses across industries, from consumer products to automobiles and coffee.
China is also becoming more sophisticated agriculturally. Large-scale greenhouse cultivation, advanced irrigation and corporate farming are helping the country increase production of blueberries and other crops such as avocados and durian, potentially reducing opportunities for foreign agricultural exporters.
Driscoll’s is not abandoning China. The company is expanding offseason production and exporting some Yunnan-grown blueberries to other Asian markets. It also believes Chinese blueberry consumption still has room to grow because per-capita consumption remains below levels in the United States and Europe.
But its experience provides a striking lesson about doing business in the world’s second-largest economy.
Driscoll’s entered China hoping to create millions of new blueberry consumers. It succeeded—but in the process, it also helped create an enormous domestic industry capable of competing directly against the company that helped build the market in the first place.
