CARLSBAD — Robyn Ukegawa has been known as the “strawberry girl” her whole life.
For someone who spent her childhood growing up at the Carlsbad Strawberry fields, the description was fitting. The Ukegawa family owns and operates the Carlsbad Strawberry Company, located on Cannon Road just off Interstate 5. The farm is hard to miss, with rows of bright green bushes dotted with ripe red fruit stretching across the farmland.
The Ukegawa family has cultivated the Carlsbad Strawberry Company — and its fields — for over seven decades. Established in 1952 by Hiroshi Ukegawa, Robyn Ukegawa’s grandfather, the farm is known not only for its fresh fruit but also for its iconic “u-pick” experience, where visitors venture into the strawberry fields to pick and choose their own strawberries.
“We’re a family business. That’s where our roots are,” Robyn Ukegawa said.
Robyn Ukegawa, now manager of the Carlsbad Strawberry Company, remembers spending her childhood weekends driving a forklift and working at the family’s original one-window produce stand. The business has since grown, boasting 10 window stalls and agritourism attractions, including u-pick strawberries, a pumpkin patch, petting zoos and more.
As strawberry season draws to a close and the farm prepares its transition to its fall offerings and pumpkin patch, Robyn’s father and Carlsbad Strawberry Company president Jimmy Ukegawa said seeing the next generation of his family take on the business is one of the most meaningful parts of his job.
“We’re building something right now that hopefully will just keep growing,” Jimmy Ukegawa said.
Robyn Ukegawa said she continues to work at Carlsbad Strawberry Company because it means being a part of a legacy. As the next generation of Ukegawas — which includes her son — forms, she said she also hopes the business will be sustained.
Yet, the Ukegawa’s efforts didn’t immediately yield abundant success. In the early 1900’s, Fukutaro and Tomoye Ukegawa, Hiroshi Ukegawa’s parents, immigrated to the U.S. from Japan and started their own vegetable farm in Tustin. However, during World War II, Hiroshi Ukegawa and his family were interned at Poston, Ariz. The family was given a week to set its business affairs in order, Jimmy Ukegawa said.
About 120,000 Japanese Americans were held in American concentration camps following an executive order from the federal government, according to Densho, a nonprofit organization that aims to preserve the history of Japanese American incarceration during WWII.
Armed guards and barbed wire greeted the Ukegawas when they arrived at the camp. During this time, Hiroshi Ukegawa enlisted as a paratrooper in the Army’s 13th Airborne Division.
Four years later, the Ukegawas were released from internment, but “lost everything,” Robyn Ukegawa said.
So, the Ukegawas resowed their own fields.
The family settled in Oceanside, focusing on selling tomatoes, strawberries and other wholesale produce and eventually reaching profitability. However, the family business went through several bad years during the 1980s due to competing imports from Mexico and flat prices, Jimmy Ukegawa said.
These issues persist for the business, with rising labor, land and water costs prompting the family to “innovate” and find solutions over the decades.
Jimmy Ukegawa said he decided to come back to the farm in order to help “turn the family business around.” During this time, he said he worked about 100 hours per week and made frequent trips to Mexico to experiment with growing produce there at lower cost (however, this ultimately did not work out in the long term).
In college, Jimmy Ukegawa got the idea for the business’s now-iconic u-pick experience after his physics lab partner, who was from San Francisco, asked him what a strawberry tree looked like (strawberries grow on herbaceous perennial plants).
The u-pick attraction and other agritourism events, such as the farm’s annual pumpkin patches, corn mazes and sunflower fields, gained traction and ultimately became a major part of Carlsbad Strawberry Company’s business model. What had started as a necessity became a business staple.
Despite these challenges, Jimmy Ukegawa said the business maintained its standard for fresh strawberries because fruits “picked right off the vine” are much sweeter. Before Jimmy Ukegawa took the reins of the family business, he said it sold older produce cheaply in the warehouse. The standard has since changed.
“We’ve never sold a day-old strawberry,” Jimmy Ukegawa said.
People who visited the Carlsbad strawberry fields said this standard is apparent.
Maryam Afshin, who picked strawberries with her daughter at the fields, said the u-pick experience allowed her to bond with her daughter in a special way.
“This is a different level of fresh. You walk in and there’s a smell of strawberries all over,” Afshin said.
Robyn Ukegawa said she appreciated the farm’s relationship with the local community. The COVID-19 pandemic “sparked community outreach” when they opened their farm to allow visitors to safely shop for produce outside, she said.
She recalled telling her dad that her classmates recognized that their family owned the strawberry fields and said they were “famous.”
“I think that was one of the first times I saw my dad’s face just absolutely light up with pride and happiness that we’re known for that and known in the community,” Robyn Ukegawa said.
In 2022, dozens of community members spoke at a Carlsbad Planning Commission meeting, and more than 100 sent letters protesting proposed land-use regulations for the farm’s agritourism business. The changes would have required the Carlsbad Strawberry Company to make substantial infrastructure investments that the family said would have forced the business to close.
Jimmy Ukegawa said the experience made him feel the business was a valued part of the community, and expressed gratitude not only to new customers but also to returning customers — some of whom have been patrons for decades.
“We’ll keep this going as long as we can,” Jimmy Ukegawa said.
