On the bluffs of the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois, Crystal Moore-Stevens and her family grow something you won’t find on most farms: serviceberries.
“When we first moved to this property, we invested in dozens and dozens and dozens of serviceberry trees,” said Moore-Stevens, co-owner of Flourish Farm and Folk School. “This is the first year that they're really putting on lots and lots of fruit.”
All those berries meant Moore-Stevens could help a friend in a pinch. Cindy Higgerson owns Larder and Cupboard, an artisanal, small-batch jam company in St. Louis.
Higgerson specializes in local, hard-to-find ingredients, including serviceberries. But this year, her usual foraging spots didn’t work out — so she’s buying her berries from Moore-Stevens.
As she fills containers with the blueberry-sized maroon fruit, she tastes a few.
“They taste like a combination of berries, I think, with the seeds in there tasting sort of like almond,” Higgerson said. “It almost gives it notes of cherry in there.”
Serviceberry enthusiasts like Higgerson and Moore-Stevens are part of a new push to expose more people to this largely unknown berry. Though the native fruit is commercially harvested in Canada, experts say building a U.S. market could be a challenge.
The push to market
Serviceberries, or juneberries, are a native plant that grows throughout North America and goes by a lot of different names, including shadberry and saskatoon. They’re adapted to the Midwest’s extreme weather and local wildlife love them — but the berries aren’t just for the birds.
People all over the region forage and eat them. And in some ways, the berries are having a moment. Last year, botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer released her latest book, The Serviceberry, which sparked new interest in the native fruit.
And there’s also a growing push to get these berries onto farms.
Bill Davison works on commercializing the serviceberry and similar crops at the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit based in Champaign, Illinois, that promotes sustainable agriculture.
“It's a native shrub, it's highly nutritious, it tastes great,” Davison said. “It can support regional food systems and diversified farming. But it would take consumers getting informed and then making decisions based on that information to support that kind of a system, because you can always find some cheaper berry product in the marketplace.”
Davison said there’s already a developed market for serviceberries in Canada, where they’re grown on large orchards and even mechanically harvested.
But he said the berries are rare on U.S. farms, partly because the U.S. agricultural system is designed to support commodity crops, like corn and soybeans.
“That's what [the food system] does well,” Davison said. “What it does not do well is make room for specialty crops. So the infrastructure, the subsidies, the support, the money, energy, all go to the main commodities.”
Madeline Wimmer is a fruit production educator at the University of Minnesota Extension. Though there isn’t much serviceberry production in the state right now, she said a few Minnesota farmers are trying them out.
Most people haven’t heard of serviceberries yet, Wimmer added, and there needs to be more education to popularize them. She said they can be a better choice for the environment because they often don’t travel far to get to people’s plates.
“I'm always kind of pushing for the idea of having native berries in smoothie bowls, because we oftentimes see acai in smoothie bowls,” Wimmer said. ”Acai is great. But if we're thinking about lowering the carbon footprint and kind of celebrating what we have here, we've got a lot of things.”
As an added bonus, Wimmer said, serviceberries are only available for a short time each year, which makes eating them feel like a holiday to celebrate.
Foraging for ingredients
Without many farm or wholesale options, most people are foraging serviceberries, even in cities like Chicago, where people can pick them along the Bloomingdale Trail, a popular running and biking path.
When the trail first opened a decade ago, Ben Helphand and other co-founders of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail decided to line it with serviceberries.
“It's beautiful, it's native, it's of the region and of the city, so it's a nice kind of symbol for the trail as well,” Helphand said.
Soon after that, trail regulars added the berries to their diets, including local nature educator Bonnie Tawse.
“Someone will stop and say, ‘Are you sure you can eat those?’” Tawse said. “And so it's a great moment, you know, a teachable moment, as we say, to just say, ‘Yes, you can eat them. They're delicious.’”
As the trail’s foraging community grew, the group began to test and develop recipes. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the trail, Tawse published those recipes in Berries for Bloomingdale: The Serviceberry Cookbook.
Tawse said this type of foraging forces people to tune into nature’s calendar instead of benefitting from the instant gratification of most modern shopping.
“It sort of flips the script a little bit,” said Tawse, who also leads a citizen science project tracking the bloom times of the trees. “It's on us to slow down to take the time to go check, literally physically, go check on the tree. I think that's really special.”
In North Dakota, one company uses serviceberries for another purpose: to provide meaningful jobs for people with developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injuries and mental health issues.
Thunderbird Ranch Gourmet Foods and Dakota Seasonings are owned and operated by Open Door Center in Valley City, North Dakota. The two brands produce juneberry jams, pie fillings, syrups and other products which they sell at their brick-and-mortar location and online.
Manager Kay Metcalf purchases berries from local foragers, but she has to think ahead to make sure she has enough to meet demand.
“I've got a 10 by 20 [foot] walk-in freezer, so I try to keep two years worth of berries on hand,” Metcalf said. “Because we've gotten caught where there's been a frost in the spring when the trees are blossoming, and you do not get any berries in that year.”
Getting people to try them
Back in St. Louis, jam maker Cindy Higgerson considered herself lucky as she weighed the berries she picked at Flourish Farm, plus the few she was able to forage this year.
Without them, the “sad little pile” of berries she picked in the St. Louis area would have made a single jar, she said.
Higgerson put the berries in a pan on the stove, mashed them, brought them to a simmer and then ladled the chunky maroon jam into 23 small jars that will sell for about $9 each.
Finally, the lids of the jam jars let out staccato pops, meaning they’re airtight and ready to sell.
A few days later, Higgerson arranged them on her stand at St. Louis’ popular Tower Grove Farmers’ Market.
But her supply didn’t last long. Before the market officially opened, one shopper showed up to buy the jam. Soon, a steady stream of curious customers were visiting the tent, excited about the jam – even though many had never heard of serviceberries.
Higgerson sold out in just two hours. She and other serviceberry fans hope even more people will get to taste this early summer delicacy soon.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
