BCBusiness

october 2015 BCBusiness 25 paul Joseph FACTOID The cranberry, blueberry and Concord grape are the only native fruits cultivated in North America L ast year Peter Dhillon, CEO of Richmond- based Richberry Group of Companies, became the ˜rst non-American and youngest-ever chairman of Ocean Spray Cranberries. Rich- berry is the largest Canadian owner and one of the largest shareholders of Ocean Spray, a co-operative owned by 700-odd cranberry growers in North America and Chile. This year Dhillon, a UBC alumnus, cel- ebrated his 50th birthday with a $7.5-million bequest to found the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at UBC's Sauder School of Business. The centre— which was expected to open this fall under an interim director—will support the study, teaching and pro- motion of values-driven business practices locally, nationally and around the world. Your father was B.C.'s first Sikh RCMP officer. How did your family become cran- berry growers? My father was an immi- grant who came to Canada when he was 13 years old. He and his brother lived with their aunt in Burnaby. Their family was still back in India. They basically sold everything to get him here. I remember him telling me that he and his brother after school would have to pick up pop bottles and pop cans, bring Peter Dhillon T h e C o n v e r s a t i o n canada's largest cranberry grower and first non-u.s chair of ocean spray on learning the family trade and the importance of business ethics by Felicity Stone them home, try to make money. They used to live on a sawdust oor, so we came from a very humble upbringing. When he ˜nished high school, he couldn't ˜nd a job so he joined the RCMP. Then he was a prison guard at Oakalla and then a sheri£ o§cer in Vancouver. He was always an entre- preneur on the side. He went from owning apartments to restaurants to gas stations, and invested in California peach and prune farms when the Canadian dollar was higher than the U.S. My parents grew up in the Punjab region, which is called the breadbasket of India, so agriculture was in their DNA. It was my mother who actually spurred my dad to go into cranberries. They scraped together every penny they could and invested with two other shareholders. My dad ran the business to a point that they were doing so well that he retired from policing and went full-time into cranberry farming. You also have a legal back- ground. After graduating from UBC with a B.A. in his- tory, you got a law degree from the University of Leeds in the U.K. Why did you decide to go that route? This business partnership that my dad was involved in was breaking up, and one partner wanted to sue another part- ner. I remember our lawyer telling my dad, 'You're getting dragged into this even though it's not about you.' My dad didn't have postsecondary education, was a police o§- cer, but I just felt so vul- nerable for him. I thought to myself, 'There's no way I'm ever going to let this happen to me.' richBerry FarMs: By the nuMBers Land devoted to cranberries in B.C. and Quebec 1,297 ACRES Expected 2015 harvest 30 MILLION LB. Number of Employees 50/100 YEAR ROUND/ HARVEST

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