The man who made a billion off blueberries

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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This guy's story is kind of amazing. So this is basically a farmer billionaire.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:46)
Love it.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:00)
Let me give you this one. This is kind of a crazy story. So do the words John bragged mean anything to you? No, they don't mean anything to me either. Shout out to Shane Parrish over at Farnham Street. He did a great podcast with this guy that caught my attention. This guy's story is kind of amazing. So this is basically a farmer billionaire.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:21)
Love it. And?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:22)
And. There was only two sources for this. Farnham Street and the Van Trump Report had written about this guy. There's only things I could find. He's got a biography as well. But all right, so here's this guy's story. I just think there's a bunch of factoids about this guy that I just think you're gonna love. You're gonna love this guy's whole aura, his vibe. He is the Billy of the Week. Cue the music.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? A billion dollars.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:54)
John Bragg, this guy grows up on a family farm, like a sawmill or something like that. And when he's in high school, what do teenagers do? They start to experiment, they start to dabble. Maybe a little bit of, maybe girls, maybe weed. No, no, blueberries. He tries to harvest blueberries for the first time at 13, 14 years old.
He gets the itch. And then he goes to a local blueberry farmer, he decides, hey, can I pick blueberries for you? And he picks blueberries all year. His last year of high school, him and four or five other blueberry pickers end up making $4,000 each picking blueberries, which was a lot of money at the time, because this guy is very old. And he realizes, oh wait, I can pay for college if I just pick blueberries every year. And so he's making, college was like 10 or 12 grand, he's making four grand. He realizes, oh, I can do this, my parents otherwise weren't really going to be able to send me, but I can do this. And so he makes more money the next year and the next year picking blueberries.
Finally, when he graduates, he's got a couple options on the table. Plan A was going to be to become a teacher and he was going to make, I think, like $3,800 or something like that, being a teacher, an extra hundred bucks if he coaches the basketball team or something. And Plan B was, let me go work on the family business, maybe over time, buy out my dad on the sawmill. But he decides to go play and say, he's like, I think this blueberry thing, there's something to it. And he decides to start his own blueberry farm. So he buys a little piece of land and he starts trying to harvest blueberries. And it goes pretty well the first couple of years. He's doing all right. But a couple of years in, there's a problem in the blueberry industry, which was that one year, there was just huge supply glut. So there was way too many blueberries, not enough buyers and prices crashed. And so he's like, shit, could have quit. But he's like, no, no, no, I'm just gonna figure out what I should have done differently. He's like, I need basically like a backup plan, a sort of, you know, an insurance. And he wasn't doing financial insurance, but he's like, I need another way to make money in case this ever happens again. Never again will I let this happen to be where I'm at the mercy of the prices. And so he decides, I think I need to build a packaging and freezing plant for blueberries. Now he's got no money, but he's like, I'm gonna try to do this. So he goes to the other blueberry farmers. He says, hey guys, we all just got whipped. Let's put some money in together and I'm gonna build this plant. And then you can use the plant too. You could freeze and package your stuff too if we ever have oversupply. And so they do that. He borrows money from the bank. He gets money from the other farmers. He starts to build this thing. No experience, by the way, no manufacturing, no factory experience, but he's like, I can do this. So he builds this plant. And in the first year that they build the plant, he's ready for two million, like a capacity of two million, but they only produce 100,000 because there's this crazy frost that kills all the blueberry production that year. And he's like, oh my god, I owe so much money. And we came in at like 5% of the estimated freezing capacity. This is terrible. I have this empty factory now. I owe a lot of money. And basically it's like, dude, you gotta just let this go, declare bankruptcy, move on with your life. Instead, he calls another guy who he knows, this guy, McCain. And he's like, McCain, he's like, yo, what's something you need to make, but you don't wanna make? Is there anything? Give me the last thing you wanna do, but you should do it. And the guy's like, all right, I got you onion rings. He's like, onion rings? Okay. He's like, can you send me like a file, like about it? So he gets like a little book on how to make onion rings. And he's like, all right, say less. I'm never gonna ask you another question. I will figure this out from here. So he's got an empty factory, but he turns it into like just for that one season or whatever. He makes onion rings for this guy. It just tides him over enough to continue. And so he carries on and he ends up building something called Oxford Frozen Foods, which today controls about 40 to 50% of the global supply of blueberries. It's like 70 million pounds of blueberries they're making every year.