Pushing Cherries

Pushing Cherries. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The 2012 cherry season is still underway with a lot of good cherries still in the stores. James Michael, promotion director with Northwest Cherries says they continue to see ads in store for cherries.

MICHAEL: Overall cherries have been the number one advertised item for almost a month. We lost out here to red seedless grapes by a couple hundred stores over the last week but we’re still talking about 11-thousand stores out of probably 16 to 18-thousand in the U.S. In the last few weeks we’ve been in about 16-thousand stores so retailers have been maintaining their emphasis on cherries.

Cherries have been in stores now most of the month and Michael says they used to see a shift in store products.

MICHAEL: Where other items fell away and retailers continued to emphasis cherries and they brought grapes along as well so that will take a little bit of consumer attention. Overall we’re getting into some of our best cherries of the year and we still have a month to go on our season. Last year we saw that cherry sales actually increased here in the late season. There’s a lot of opportunity for retailers to make some dollars at the end of their season with northwest cherries.

The plus side has been the lengthening of the cherry season.

MICHAEL: That’s one of the challenges especially of the cherry season when you have something that is really grown, picked and sold all within a short period of time it make it challenging to analyze what is going on in real time.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.