 The Miss-Lou Blueberry Growers Cooperative is an organization of more than 50 members who collectively maintain hundreds of acres of blueberry bushes in Louisiana and Mississippi. Last season, co-op members produced over 300,000 lbs. of fresh blueberries and about 1 million lbs. of processed fruit. The co-op offers its members support and assistance with all aspects of blueberry production.
The Miss-Lou Blueberry Growers Cooperative got its start when three Mississippi growers banded together to market their product to local and national consumers. “It was very difficult to harvest, market and deliver our blueberries in a timely manner and then to collect the money that was owed us,” says Luis Monterde of B&M in Purvis, MS, one of the pioneers of the organization. “Sometimes we didn’t get paid for 90 days but it was a start.”
 After a few years, the co-op joined forces with its counterpart in Arkansas.
“It was a better arrangement for us, except that we had to deliver the berries ourselves,” Monterde says.
Once membership and production increased, the group contacted a broker in New Orleans to handle the marketing of the blueberries. This venture was successful until Miss-Lou growers began producing processed blueberries for the frozen market, along with hand-picked fresh berries.
“The New Orleans broker didn’t have a market for the processed fruit, so we decided to look elsewhere,” Monterde says. “That’s when we began our association with the Michigan Blueberry Growers
(MBG) and it has been a very good relationship for many years. For the first time, we got paid weekly for fresh blueberries and received advanced payments for processed berries to help cover our expenses.”
The co-op’s association with MBG continues to be a profitable one today. Miss-Lou co-op members learned early on that, by working together, we can achieve greater success than by trying to make it alone.
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