The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of Midwest Craft & Kitchen

Advertorial · 3 days ago · By Corinne Lathrop

She spent 34 years watching what came off the fruit in a Michigan packing plant. Now she won’t let her granddaughter eat a berry straight from the box.

At 69, Ardith Vanderzee knows something most of us never think about: the berries in your fridge were never washed. The bowl she made for her granddaughter became the most-asked-about thing at her market stand. Now the market is closed, and around 300 bowls are left.

Ardith Vanderzee (69) in her studio in Suttons Bay, Michigan, this October, with one of the last bowls from the fall firing.

The cherry orchards along the road into Suttons Bay are bare now. The Saturday market closed for the year two weeks ago, and the folding table Ardith Vanderzee stood behind every weekend since May is leaning against the wall of her studio, a converted pole barn behind her house.

On the shelves above it sit the bowls, each with a small spout on one side. Ardith picks one up, drops in a handful of raspberries and opens the cold tap into the spout.

The water doesn’t pour onto the berries. It runs in low along the side and starts to circle, and the whole handful turns slowly around the little cone in the middle. Bits of leaf drift out with the water. The raspberries come out whole.

“Everybody laughs the first time. Then they lean in to look at what’s left in the bottom of the bowl, and they stop laughing.”

She is 69. For 34 years, from 1987 until she retired in 2021, she worked the wash and flume lines at a cherry packing plant outside Traverse City, standing beside water that carried fruit from one end of the building to the other.

“I can tell you what comes off fruit,” she says. “Leaves, stems, dirt, sand. Little spiders, earwigs, gnats. People think fruit comes out of the field clean. It doesn’t. It comes out of a field.”

The bowls started as one bowl, made for one little girl. A little over a year later they are the thing strangers ask her about in the grocery store. And because the market has closed for the season, this is the first time they’ve been for sale online.

Thirty-four years on a cherry line, and the one thing she learned about water

At the plant, nobody ever sprayed the cherries hard, because a strong jet bruises soft fruit. The fruit rode in channels of moving water, called flumes. “Nothing touches the fruit,” she says. “The water does the work. It tumbles everything a little, and whatever was on it lets go and goes with the water.”

Cherries get that treatment. Berries mostly don’t. Strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are usually picked straight into the clamshell they’re sold in, right in the field, and nobody washes them before the lid snaps shut. The first person to rinse them is you.

Field-packed and straight from the store. Nobody washed these before the lid snapped shut.

Ardith knew that. Her granddaughter didn’t.

Hattie is four. She is what her mother, Ardith’s daughter Joelle, calls “a berry monster”. Last summer Ardith watched her climb onto a kitchen chair, pull a clamshell of blueberries out of the fridge and eat half of it before anyone noticed. Straight from the box.

“I knew exactly where those berries had been. And I knew what they had never been through.”

Ardith took up pottery when she retired. First a Tuesday-night class at the community center, then a used wheel and a small kiln in the pole barn behind her house. That week she threw a small, deep bowl. Then she shaped a little spout to stand upright on the side of the bowl, so the water would come in low and run along the wall, the way it came into the flumes at the plant.

Ardith throws every bowl and sets every spout herself. The height and angle of the spout is the part she won’t let anyone else touch.

It took her eleven tries. Too low, and the water shot straight out through the holes. On the twelfth bowl, the water caught the wall and started to turn.

Hattie named it the first afternoon. She stood on her stool at the sink, watched her blueberries go round and shouted for everybody to come and see “the berry-go-round”. She has washed every berry she has eaten since.

Ardith took two bowls to her market table that Saturday, mostly as a joke. A woman bought both before nine. The next week there was a line.

They got around by word of mouth. Summer people took them home to Chicago and Detroit and wrote asking for more, so Ardith started mailing a few boxes a week from the studio. Until now there was no shop and no website, just that folding table in Suttons Bay and a stack of letters on her kitchen counter.

What makes Ardith’s bowl different

Most of us wash berries with a quick run under the tap, right in the plastic box. In one 2025 survey, about four in ten people who only rinse their produce said they rinse for ten seconds or less.

“The stream from your tap hits the top layer and goes straight out the bottom,” Ardith says. “The berries underneath barely get wet. Turn it up so it reaches them and it crushes your raspberries.”

Soaking isn’t much better. A vinegar bath can leave the fruit tasting of vinegar, and the berries sit in their own dirty water. Wash the whole box and put it back in the fridge wet, and it turns fuzzy in two days.

Her bowl does what the flumes did. The water comes in low through the spout, follows the curved wall and starts circling on its own. The berries ride along in a cushion of water instead of being hit by it, turning so every side gets rinsed. Leaves and grit go out with the water through the holes around the cone, and the cone keeps the berries out of your drain.

“I didn’t invent swirling water,” she says, before anyone can ask. “Every packing plant in this county has used it for fifty years. All I did was put it in a bowl that fits under a kitchen tap.”

That is also why so many of the cheap copies online don’t work, she says. “If the spout sits too low or there are too many holes, the water runs straight out and never builds up. Then people say it doesn’t spin and throw it in a drawer.” She sets every spout by hand and tests every finished bowl under the studio tap.

She is just as blunt about what it can’t do. The bowl is about five inches across and takes one good handful at a time. “Dump a whole pound of strawberries in there and nothing is going to swirl,” she says. “Wash what you’re about to eat. The rest stays dry in the fridge and lasts longer.”

And she won’t make promises about chemicals. Strawberries are No. 3 on this year’s Dirty Dozen list from the Environmental Working Group, blackberries No. 9 and blueberries No. 12, and she knows plenty of her customers worry about that. “No rinse in the world gets out what’s inside a berry,” she says. “What I can get off is the dirt, the bugs and whatever all those hands left behind. That I can do, and it does it better than I ever did with a colander.”

Some of them came back to the market just to say thank you

Ardith keeps a shoebox of notes people have left for her at the market. She pulls out a card from August and reads it out loud.

“That one usually hangs on the fridge in the studio,” Ardith says. “That’s who they’re for. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s sink.”

The bowls come in four glazes that Ardith dips by hand: Dune Cream, a speckled white like the sand at Sleeping Bear; Lake Michigan Blue, with blue running down from the rim; Leelanau Sage, a soft green; and Deep Cobalt. Every glaze runs a little differently in the kiln, so no two bowls are alike.

The four glazes from this fall’s firing: Dune Cream, Lake Michigan Blue, Leelanau Sage and Deep Cobalt. Each one is dipped by hand, so every bowl comes out a little different.

This is what’s left from the season

The market closed for the year at the start of October. Ardith had fired one last big kiln load in September for the fall crowds. Then the weather turned early and the last three Saturdays were rained out.

So most afternoons now go to packing. The bowls come down off the shelves, get tested under the tap and wrapped in paper. A notice with next year’s opening day in May is pinned to the wall above the sink.

The last bowls from the fall firing, waiting to be packed. Every one is tested under the studio tap before it goes in a box.

What’s left comes to around 300 bowls. The kiln stays cold over the winter, the barn is too cold to work in from December on, and there won’t be another firing this size before spring.

“I could keep them in boxes until May,” Ardith says. “But they’d sit in a barn all winter while people eat berries out of the box. That makes no sense to me.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: $59 a bowl, down from the $89 they sold for at the market. “I’m not doing this to get rich,” she says. “I want them in kitchens before Christmas. Half the people at the market bought them as gifts.”

Her daughter Joelle, Hattie’s mother, is the one who put them online. “Mom makes the bowls,” she says. “I just answer the emails.”

The water comes in low through the spout and circles on its own. The raspberries ride along in it and come out whole.

The market won’t open again until May. When the bowls from the fall firing are gone, that’s it until spring.

What customers say

Where to get one of Ardith’s bowls

The bowls are only available through Ardith’s own shop, the one place to get the real bowls from this fall’s firing.

The market is closed until May, and what’s left from the fall firing is all there is

“We’ll fire again in spring,” Ardith says. “But not like this. This was the big one.” When the last bowl from the September kiln load is gone, the shop closes until the market opens again.

Payment and shipping: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and ships within 1 to 2 business days. Every order comes with Ardith’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

One of Ardith’s bowls at home, where she always wanted them to end up: by the sink in the morning, on the table by lunch.

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DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full return policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Rinsing with water helps remove surface dirt, debris and insects; it does not remove pesticide residues inside the fruit, bacteria, viruses or parasites. Images are for illustration; because each piece is finished and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly.

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