From Law to Harvest
Jacqueline Alexander, J.D. obtained her law degree from Lewis & Clark Law School and currently works as a full-time farmer. She owns and manages Morale Orchards, LLC, a 40-acre pear orchard in Hood River, Oregon. She is also the founder and CEO of Morale Food Co., a start-up value-added food manufacturing company, also located in Hood River. The company specializes in producing freeze-dried and individually quick-frozen (IQF) products for both wholesale and consumer markets. In addition to her professional endeavors, Ms. Alexander is a highly engaged and busy philanthropist who champions black leadership and disaster relief efforts.
Ms. Alexander has been the owner and operator of Morale Orchards since 2006, when she purchased land her ex-husband’s family worked as migrant farm workers in the early 1960s. After taking ownership of the farm, Ms. Alexander has consistently run a profitable operation producing Asian, Bartlett, and D’Anjou pears with yields of over 400 metric tons annually.
In addition to managing the financial and business operations of her orchard, she is a member of the Fair Food Program with 8 full-time employees and up to 23 seasonal workers.
Ms. Alexander is passionate about diversity and inclusion for minorities and received the Northwest Mountain Minority Supplier Development Council’s 2017 Supplier of the Year Award. She was also acknowledged as one of the top 50 Black-owned businesses in the Portland, Oregon area according to the Portland Business Journal.
Ms. Alexander’s commitment to building and providing sustainable business models for growers was initiated after learning first-hand the impacts agricultural food waste can have on the bottom line of her orchard.
In 2015, she focused on transforming farm “cull”, imperfect produce that cannot be taken directly to markets, into value-added food products. Her company’s initial venture is a freeze-drying manufacturing facility — The Puff Factory, Hood River. This facility prepares and processes freeze-dried products for both wholesale and retail markets. Know Your Fruit, a single-origin, freeze-dried fruit snack brand was born from this initiative. The brand uses locally grown fruit to create its products. Ms. Alexander is paving new ways to monetize valuable produce that had previously been designated as food waste and is in discussions with other groups about replicating her scalable and repeatable model for financial and business innovation.
In addition to her professional and entrepreneurial activities, Ms. Alexander and her family have made significant contributions to various organizations, including endowing the Lewis & Clark Law School’s annual MLK- speaker series and being the lead donor for Lewis & Clark College’s York Memorial, raised in honor of the African American slave who accompanied the school’s namesake expedition. Additionally, Ms. Alexander is on the board of SBP — formerly the St. Bernard Project — a disaster recovery nonprofit that started after Hurricane Katrina. She is a member of several food industry associations, including serving on the board of the Upcycled Food Association, a non-profit leveraging market forces to prevent food waste, as well as a member of the Oregon State Business Council's Food and Beverage Task Force.
To learn more about Morale Orchards and Know Your Fruit, follow them on Facebook and Instagram or visit www.knowyourfruit.com.
Click here to view “Expressions In Black: Episode 5,” where Jacqueline shares detailed insight into her journey.
