Sun-Maid Remade

By Dennis Pollock, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

Mar. 15–The “Sun-Maid girl,” as she is described by Sun-Maid Growers in Kingsburg, is not just thinking outside the box.

She’s stepped off it — at least for a time.

She speaks now, has gone digital, is carrying grapes through a vineyard and is appearing in television commercials nationwide.

It’s the first time in her 90-year history that the icon has become an animated figure, pointing out that sunlight travels 93 million miles to turn grapes into raisins.

“That’s all we put in,” she says, “grapes and sunshine.”

Barry Kriebel, president of Sun-Maid, said the marketing campaign is rooted in research that showed “few people outside the Central Valley realize that raisins come naturally from grapes that dry in the sun. They don’t know where they come from.”

The likeness of the Sun-Maid girl last updated in 1970 will continue to appear on boxes of raisins, he said.

The animation campaign opened Monday on the cooperative’s Web site, www.sunmaid.com. Web site visitors can watch the animated commercial in 15-second and 30-second versions and read a history of the Sun-Maid girl, who is based on a real person, the late Lorraine Collett Petersen.

The commercials have begun airing on cable and satellite television, and today a full-page advertisement is scheduled to appear in USA Today.

Kriebel said the two commercials, one 15 seconds, the other 30, averaged less than $200,000 each to produce. He said Sun-Maid each year spends about $4 million to $6 million on advertising, and this year the total could be $7 million.

“It could go up or down in future years,” he said. “In the 20 years I have been president, the range has been from $4 million to $10 million.”

The now-talking icon could end up in different settings in coming months and years, Kriebel said, “maybe in the kitchen, in the store, hiking.” She’s likely to be speaking different languages from time to time. A third of raisins produced in the United States, most of them within a 50-mile radius of Fresno, are exported.

She may also end up selling other dried fruits in the Sun-Maid arsenal, Kriebel said, such as as prunes, apricots and dates.

Andie Bolt, a stand-up comic and actress who lives near Lake Isabella in Kern County, supplies the voice of the Sun-Maid figure.

“It was a lot of fun doing this because I grew up eating the little boxes of raisins,” she said. “My sisters didn’t like raisins, so I got theirs.”

Little did she realize she would one day speak for the girl on the boxes, which she said is an honor.

“Her voice is perfect,” said Jeff Kleiser, president of Synthespian Studios, based in Hollywood and North Adams, Mass. He heads the animation production company that brought the Sun-Maid girl to life.

Kleiser, along with his wife and creative partner, Diana Walczak, were acquainted with Kriebel because all three are on the board of directors for the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. Some Rockwell paintings were used in Sun-Maid advertising decades ago.

“One of the real challenges was how to bring her to life,” Kleiser said. “What is a modern Sun Maid like?”

Through the years, the maiden’s image has been updated on the boxes of raisins that find their way around the globe.

Kleiser credited Walczak with making the new icon “more glamorous and attractive, but still wholesome.” Among her touches, she said, are eyes that are “more twinkly” and hair that is pushed back under the distinctive red bonnet she has worn for nine decades.

“Eyes are the windows to the soul,” Kleiser said, adding that the eyes of the maiden through the years have been mostly dark. “We brightened the eyes; they’re alive and twinkling.”

Kriebel told Kleiser he showed the animation to workers at the Kingsburg plant, and one of them, a 15-year employee, burst into tears upon seeing the icon come to life.

Synthespian’s credits include “The X Men” movie series and attractions at Universal Studios in Florida and Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Va.

The Sun-Maid marketing campaign appeared to be well-received by those who belong to the 1,000-member cooperative as well as others in the raisin industry.

“It’s a good thing,” said Bob Epperson, a Kerman raisin grower and Sun-Maid member. “It will give us a chance to reach younger people with a more lively Sun-Maid girl. And we’ll have the opportunity to take her into settings that relate to our raisins, to get her off the box and into the home.”

Harvey Singh, a director with the Raisin Bargaining Association who periodically sells his raisins to Sun-Maid, said the idea of promoting “natural wholesome goodness” should help the entire industry.

“If they’re doing something to promote their brand, more power to them,” said Singh, who grows raisins in the Fowler-Selma area. “If it will help excite the general public and bring awareness of the value of raisins for nutrition, I say good for them.”

The commercials are based upon consumer research conducted by McCann Erickson in Los Angeles. The Sun-Maid Web site was created in collaboration with Marsteller, an advertising agency in New York.

Sun-Maid has not always fully embraced industry marketing campaigns, notably questioning the efficacy of the well-known Dancing Raisin campaign by the now-defunct California Raisin Advisory Board. A criticism was that the campaign boosted sales of Dancing Raisin paraphernalia more than it did raisins.

“We had creative and execution issues with that,” Kriebel said.

A watercolor painting of Petersen, the original Sun-Maid girl, is kept in a concrete vault at Sun-Maid’s headquarters in Kingsburg. Her likeness first appeared on packages of Sun-Maid raisins in 1916.

Her red sun bonnet, ultimately faded pink, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1988. A replica remains on display in the lobby of Sun-Maid’s Kingsburg offices.

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GCI,