05/29/07 Stemmed or Stem Free?

Stemmed or Stem Free. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. I like things easy. But at the same time I'm a bit old-fashioned and have a tough time changing my ways so when someone mentioned the prospect of a stem free cherry I was intrigued. I love northwest grown sweet cherries and Rainier's are my favorite but it can be a bit of a pain trying to get them out of the bag with all those stems in the way. So I called my friend Andrew Willis who is the Promotion Director with Northwest Cherries and asked him about it. WILLIS: Fairly rare and not very widespread. There's not a lot of volume there. We've done a little work in Australia and the Australian's don't seem to mind stem free. You know I think you'd be hard pressed to find any stem free cherries on the domestic market. Australia?! Hmmm. Is there something a little closer? WILLIS: Yea we just don't deal with it much, it's really a niche deal on the growers side. There's one group here called the Western Sweet Cherry Group. They are a group that is really pushing this thing. Several studies have been done and they have found that people do tend to like stem free cherries. One critical issue came to mind. WILLIS: How am I going to dip it in chocolate if there is no stem? Good point. Actually the picking process is still a bit up in the air. Willis says though with labor issues in question, cherry producers are looking harder at the stem-free market since the cherry is literally shaken off the tree. WILLIS: One of the problems that people are worried about is cherries are so delicate what happens to them falling from that height onto this apparatus. Now if only they can do something about the pits. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.