05/26/08 Choosing Cherries

Choosing Cherries. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Matthew Whiting with WSU's Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser has been studying why people like certain types of cherries. Is it the color, the sweet or tartness, or perhaps it's the texture or size. He and his colleagues used two groups in their study. One trained on the various attributes of the cherry and one a general consumer group. WHITING: What we're ultimately trying to determine is not statistical significance but consumer significance. In other words if we are looking new cherry varieties how much sweeter does it have to be for consumers to actually determine that or understand that as a sweeter cherry or how much higher in acidity does this fruit need to be in order for consumers to perceive that increased acidity? So I have to ask&who won? WHITING: In terms of a winner, we did find a winner in this case and the winner was sweetness. We found that 82% of the people who chose one cherry variety as their favorite said that it was because of the sweetness of that cherry and we found almost a one to one relationship between the intensity of the sweetness and the acceptance of that cherry. Intensity of color also played a large part in acceptance. The results of the study are already being looked at in ways to produce more consumer friendly fruit. WHITING: That's what we intend to do. We use this data then to help strategize in making specific hybridizations in our breeding program, to incorporate high levels of sweetness into our germplasm. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.