03/21/08 What We Like About Cherries

Understanding What We Like About Cherries. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It seems like a simple question. Why do you like cherries? But the answer is part of an on-going research program to bring better looking and better tasting cherries to consumers. Matthew Whiting is the lead researcher with WSU's Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser. WHITING: Well, the methodology is actually quite straight forward. It's just a matter of presenting consumers with a whole bunch of different fruit and having them rate them in terms of what they perceive as being a good eating experience and what they perceive as being a poor eating experience. Matt's team used the methodology on two different groups. WHITING: In 2007, we did a couple of trials assessing those important attributes with trained panels. These are people who have been trained to recognize the different attributes of sweet cherry fruits such as the sweetness, the tartness, the overall flavor, the texture attributes and then we followed up with large scale consumer studies and these were done in Pullman this past year where we took the same cultivars and we had them answer some really simple questions. So these were not trained to identify the characteristics. They were just regular people who were out shopping for groceries. Bottom line of course is to find out really what people like and why. Whiting says there were a number of things people responded to. WHITING: These experiments were not set up to say that this cherry variety is better than that cherry variety or that cherry variety is worse than the other cherry variety. What we were intending to discover was what is it about that cherry variety that you like or don't like. Tomorrow Matt Whiting talks about the results of the tests. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.