Red Jacket Orchards — A family farm’s success story

By Kristie Snyder, GreenStar Staff

In the span of three generations, Geneva’s Red Jacket Orchards has grown from a 12-acre apple farm to a multimillion-dollar company whose bottled juice can be found up and down the East Coast and beyond. Twins Brian and Mark Nicholson, both Geneva natives and Cornell grads, now run the business that their grandfather started. Their father, Joe, ran the farm in the intermediate period, expanding his father’s original holdings to more acreage with a greater variety of fruit. Today, the orchards comprise 500 acres of land, over half of it dedicated to apples, and other fruits rounding out the rest.

For the Nicholson brothers, growth has never meant leaving behind the principles of good land stewardship that their father and grandfather pioneered. Red Jacket is committed to sustainability: Their juice is pressed in a LEED-certified facility, partially supplied with solar power. They employ integrated pest management practices in order to target and minimize pesticide use, and they work to build and maintain soil fertility and pollinator habitat. The orchard even recycles the rice hulls used as a processing aid for pressing apple juice. They’re fed, along with residual apple pulp, to livestock at two farms just up the road. Three quarters of the fruit used in bottling is either grown by Red Jacket or sourced from farms within 200 miles of Geneva. Fruits such as cranberries and lemons (not generally farmed in this area) are obviously sourced farther afield.

Red Jacket’s recipes couldn’t be simpler. Cold-pressed, fresh, unfiltered Fuji apple juice is bottled as is, or mixed with a second fruit juice: grape, black currant, strawberry, raspberry, apricot, cranberry, cherry. A bit of vitamin C, for color retention, rounds out the ingredients list. A new product, Joe’s Clean Half & Half, blends organic, Fair Trade guayusa tea with fruit-juice sweetened lemonade. Red Jacket juice is sold at all three GreenStar locations, in two sizes: 12-ounce, perfect for drinking right from the bottle, or 32-ounce — enough to share. At the West End store, you can also find Red Jacket cider, apple butter, and applesauce.

For most Red Jacket fans, the company’s history and values are simply a bonus to the best thing about a bottle of their juice — the flavor. Red Jacket’s Director of Brand Management, Kelli Foster, attributes the company’s growth to increasingly purposeful shoppers and their “love and passion for a great tasting local product. People buy it because it tastes really good,” she says. It’s as simple as that.