A Delicious Combination

A Delicious Combination. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Some time back in the late 1980’s Ray Pleva’s daughter ask him to try adding cherries to some meat in their butcher shop. Ray did and it was just the very beginning of a great idea.

PLEVA: We were in the cherry business for 40 years and the meat business for 40 years and who would ever want to put cherries in meat until Cindy was the Cherry Queen and could see that the cherry industry had an abundance of cherries and not enough uses for them and that’s when she mentioned to me if we could put cherries in meat to come up with new uses.

The story probably would have ended there if Ray didn’t notice his customers seemed to be more than enjoying the cherry infused meats.

PLEVA: Our customers that were 60, 70, 80 years old would come in and say why is it I can eat and digest your products and I eat other products and I don’t get that same benefit. And then we found that the cherry also was a natural tenderizer. It also had a natural preservative built in it and when we used it in smoked sausages it would tenderize the meat and the casing from the inside out when the heat hit it.

The idea of adding cherries to meat of course has gotten lot of media attention including Oprah and a guest stint on Tim Allen’s Home Improvement.

PLEVA: It took me five years of doing all of that to convince Dr. Boreen at Michigan State University to get involved in doing the research. And that research there found the first antioxidant in cherries and then Michigan State continued on and found 16 more components of antioxidants. And the antioxidants in the sour cherry are more of a complete balance of antioxidants which include melatonin which also has a benefit for sleep pattern.

Through all this research they also developed a line of health care products under the label, Cerise Nutraceuticals and are moving into animal health as well. But the major product is called BLENDit which is the meat enhancement.

PLEVA: We developed over 50 cherry enhanced meat products. We’ve been doing it for a long time. We know what we can do to help other people, other companies and that’s part of our goal now is to sell our BLENDit ingredients to other companies to enhance what they’re trying to do. So it’s good for the farmer, the manufacturer and it’s exceptionally good for the consumer.

More tomorrow with Ray Pleva.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.