Brightly colored Orondo Ruby cherries, growers Griggs (r) and Clennon.
Washington grows two-thirds of the nation's sweet cherries on 35,000 acres of orchards, on the sunny hillsides of the Yakima Valley and overlooking the Columbia in the Wenatchee basin. And as the cherry season begins, so does demand, especially in Asian countries. Freshly picked Washington cherries--airlifted to Japan--can sell for up to $40 a pound in Tokyo. At a Seattle QFC in early July, a 12-ounce plastic clamshell of the first cherries, a new variety called Orondo Ruby was going for $6.99.
Acknowledged by his peers to be one of the best--most careful, meticulous, successful--of the 2,500 cherry growers in the state, Marcus Griggs is a fourth-generation farmer. A decade ago, in an orchard of Rainier cherry trees overlooking the Columbia River at Orondo, Griggs noticed that the fruit of one tree had more color that the others, a scarlet, red-blushed skin. The yellow flesh tasted sweeter than Rainiers, too. Now, most growers would have shrugged it off as a random variation; not Griggs. He had the tree tested by Washington State University scientists, and it turned out that its DNA was, in fact, unique. Twenty percent more sugar, twenty percent more acidity. Griggs filed for a patent, named it the Orondo Ruby, and began propagating seedlings. By 2010, he was ready to take it to market.
Rather than sell cuttings and licensing the fruit (the usual route for patent-holders like university research stations), Griggs and his brother-in-law Bart Clennon decided to retain exclusive rights to the Orondo Ruby. But they needed what you might call "critical mass." Enough product on the supply side to satisfy the demands of the fickle, time-sensitive fruit industry. If consumers pay attention to cherry varieties at all, they remember two names: Rainiers (yellow) and Bings (dark red), but there are several more: Lapin, Chelan, Skeena, Tieton.
The brothers-in-law had owned a fruit-packing company called Orondo Fruit, which they sold to a packing house to they could concentrate on their own orchards. They recruited their family: Griggs's son, John, and daughter, Char, both work in the business, as do Bart's son, Cameron, and daughter, Cory. ((She calls them "Ka-Pow!" cherries.) They hired a market-research outfit in Chicago called The Perishable Group to run taste tests nationwide, with positive results. Locally, QFC and Fred Meyer became customers, Kroger and Sam's Club nationally.
The Rubies mature a week before the Rainiers, two weeks before the Bings, and this week is their moment. And yes, it's a short window, but the Rubies have another advantage: they keep well under refrigeration.
The traditional cherry business requires lots of land and lots of patience. You can plant maybe 250 trees to the acre, and your yield per tree is less than 100 pounds. Most growers are at the mercy of the weather; cool spring weather just delays the harvest but early summer rains are disastrous. (Griggs and Clennon have helicopters standing by to blow rainwater off the fruit before the skin splits.) They have planted their Rubies along a V-shaped trellis, a system that allows for almost a thousand trees to the acre. Smaller trees, sure, but fairly similar yields. By now, their company has propagated over 100,000 trees; their field crews will pick 60,000 boxes by the middle of July.
One box holds fifteen pounds of cherries, so the Ruby harvest this year will be close to a million pounds, double that within five years. Even after paying the packing house about 20 cents a pound to process the fruit, that's a pretty good payoff. Ka-Pow!
Leave a comment