National Rainier Cherry Day is July 11 each year, but warmer weather has brought the harvesting of Rainiers forward to as early as June. National Rainier Cherry Day “almost celebrates the last Rainiers to ship,” said James Michael, vice president of marketing for North America, for Northwest Cherry Growers, a Yakima organization that represents cherry growers in five states.
The harvest — predicted to be nearly 20 million 20-pound boxes this year — has started in some warmer areas, such as Mattawa, Grant County. The crop will really come on in June, when growers expect to harvest about 11 million boxes, or more than half the crop, and extend into August in cooler growing areas.
Earlier harvest can make planning grocery circulars and other promotions — which are planned weeks in advance — challenging, Michael said. “It’s where chaos meets the grid,” he said.
Last season, weather played havoc with retail promotions.
Record high temperatures in May and June led to earlier and record shipments during those months. Shipments peaked June 25, nearly a month earlier than in the 2014 cherry season.
Retail timing
Even with record shipments, retailers still didn’t get enough cherries for planned promotions because of strong global demand. And by early July, typically a popular promotion period for cherries, shipments dropped drastically.
Another heat wave led to a surge of shipments in late July, but by then retailers had moved on to other fruit promotions.
Rick Plath, president of Washington Fruit, said his company had anticipated — correctly — an early harvest and had sales in place then. But the packing house’s sales desk didn’t plan on the late-season surge.
Cherries were still being packed and shipped, but “we didn’t have ads set up to move the product domestically,” Plath said.
Preventing a repeat
Michael said Northwest Cherry Growers has worked in the last year to prevent a recurrence, using constant and consistent communication with retailers for several months.
Northwest Cherry Growers expects this year’s crop to be similar to 2015: an earlier start in May and strong volume in June.
But the industry isn’t expecting the drastic up-and-down shipment levels that adversely affected fruit promotions last year. The hope is that plenty of cherries will be available well into July and into early August.
Michael believes there’s still room for growth in the domestic market.
According to Nielsen Perishables Group, a Chicago-based fresh-food consulting company, 76 million Americans eat cherries. About 86 percent of those purchase one bag of Northwest cherries a year.
The rest are full-season shoppers, who buy multiple bags of cherries from the Northwest and other regions such as California.
If each of those some 65 million, one-bag cherry consumers bought an extra bag of Northwest cherries, the industry would have to produce about 28.4 million boxes of cherries — well above the record crop of 23 million boxes in 2014, Michael said.
