Harry & David Factory Tour

Jill's Journal: Chances are you’ve either sent or received a gift basket from Harry & David at some point in your life. If you don’t know what a Harry & David gift basket entails, it could be anything from decadent chocolates to baked goods to produce to snack foods. They’re based out of Medford, Oregon, which just so happens to be not far from Grants Pass. Their factory tours are rated as one of the top to take. Our family loves factory tours, so the girls and I made the gorgeous 35-minute drive to Medford this afternoon.

Our wonderful tour guide was Kay, shown here with the one thing Harry & David is always, always identified with: their Royal Riviera pears. These are the sweetest pears in the world. Biting into one of these bad boys versus a regular pear is the equivalent of driving a Rolls Royce compared to a Ford Focus.

Here’s one of the many kitchens. Harry and David Rosenberg were two Cornell-educated brothers who inherited a pear orchard in the Rogue Valley when their father died in 1914. They decided to specialize in France’s Comice pear as there was a good export market to the fine hotels of Europe at the time. It turned out the Comice pears flourished even more beautifully in Oregon conditions than in France. Soon the Royal Riviera pear was born. When the Great Depression hit, the lucrative export market vanished and the company needed a new way to sell their pears. In 1934, the brothers came up with the idea of pitching them as ideal business gifts and the rest is history. They are one of the nation’s oldest mail order/catalogue companies.

The smell alone wafting out of these kitchens on the 52-acre campus is good enough to eat.

Here’s a batch of “Moose Munch,” a popcorn delicacy. We saw several hundred pounds made in the few minutes we were in this area and they said they can’t seem to make it fast enough. I won’t tell you how many 50-pound blocks of butter are in this one vat alone.

This is one of the packaging lanes. A couple thousand people work here year-round and I believe we were told another 6,000-8,000 people are hired temporarily during each year’s busy season from October to December. The scale of this company is mind-boggling.

Each bow is still hand-tied! In fact, each and every bow at Harry & David is handmade.

In this day and age when so much is automated, what impressed me most about Harry & David is the amount of human labor that goes into each package. It was very nice to see.