Season
The shortest window on the calendar. Five weeks decides the whole year.
Commodity playbook
Who ships cherries
| Shipper | Town | County |
|---|---|---|
| Stemilt Growers | Wenatchee, WA | Chelan |
| Chelan Fresh | Chelan, WA | Chelan |
| CMI Orchards | Wenatchee, WA | Chelan |
| Domex Superfresh Growers | Yakima, WA | Yakima |
| Rainier Fruit | Selah, WA | Yakima |
| Get the full list with contacts in your inbox → breadd.ai | ||
The same tree fruit houses that pack Washington apples. One call list, two crops, and ten months between them.
Ask for the traffic or transportation manager, the same desk that handles the apple programme. That is the useful thing about this commodity: the tree fruit houses are year-round shippers, so a cherry conversation in April is really an audition for the storage apple freight that runs the other ten months. Treat it that way.
Where it hauls
The same Washington districts that pack apples pack cherries, and often in the same buildings. The Wenatchee Valley and the Columbia River corridor through Chelan, Orondo and Quincy, then the Yakima Valley south through Selah and Wapato. Oregon's Columbia Gorge around The Dalles and Hood River runs early fruit, and California's San Joaquin opens the national season several weeks before the Northwest does. The Washington packers to know:
How to open
"How's the bloom looking for cherries? I'd like to be lined up before June, and I'm interested in the apple programme after it."
To the tree fruit packers, April into MayNaming both crops in one sentence is the move. It shows you understand that the same building ships cherries in July and apples in January, and that you are asking for a relationship rather than five weeks of work.
Qualifying questions
- How fast, and what is the setpoint? Cherries are hydrocooled immediately after picking and run just above freezing. Shelf life is short and the fruit is fragile. Confirm the setpoint, and confirm the trailer is pre-cooled before it backs in, not after.
- Is any of this going to the airport? A meaningful share of Northwest cherries flies to Asia, and the ground leg to the airport is a hard cutoff rather than a delivery window. Ask whether the load is export, because missing an aircraft is not a late delivery.
- How many boxes and what does it scale? Cherry boxes are small, commonly around 20 pounds, so a load is a lot of boxes and not much weight. Get the count and the pallet configuration, because the trailer fills before the scale notices.
- What happens if it rains? Rain near harvest splits cherries and can stop picking dead for days. A truck scheduled into a rain event may have nothing to load. Ask what their cancellation practice is before you deadhead into the valley.
- Do you ship apples out of the same house? Usually yes, and that is the real prize. Cherries are five weeks; storage apples run most of the year from the same dock. Ask it in April and you are having a different conversation than everyone else calling that week.
When to call
April and May, before the fruit is on. Once the window opens in mid-June the packing houses are running around the clock and nobody is setting up a new carrier. Miss it and the next natural opening is August, calling the same desk about apples out of storage, which is the longer and steadier half of their year anyway.
Sources
- Northwest Cherry Growers season reporting: a crop estimate of 18 to 20 million boxes, a peak commercial window projected from June 15 to July 20, and daily shipments exceeding 400,000 boxes at full stride. nwcherries.com
- Washington State Tree Fruit Association, which represents the growers, packers and marketers of Washington apples, pears and sweet cherries out of the same districts and frequently the same packing houses. wstfa.org
- The April to May call window, and the load figure converting 400,000 boxes a day at roughly 2,000 boxes to a reefer load. The box counts are green; the load conversion is a working assumption.