-Southern Hemisphere Cherries

Our customers trust us to always deliver the best quality cherries, and a few years ago some of them asked if we could source the same quality from Chile and Argentina.  We have always known those two countries grow great cherries, but the best quality has mostly been shipped to China, so other countries (especially US and Canada) have generally received the lower quality fruit that doesn’t make the grade for China.  We set about changing that, and with the relationships we’ve built over many years visiting those countries we were able to establish programs with some of the leading growers and packers who share our belief that the final consumer has to be delighted when they buy cherries if you want to have repeat sales and really build the category.  To guarantee our standards are always maintained, we only pack and ship to order, and we have our quality team on the ground checking orchards and watching packing every day of the season.  It is the same team that spends summers here in Canada, so we set one quality standard for both the northern and southern hemisphere seasons.

The ‘winter cherry’ season starts with air-freight in mid October, with the first ocean containers normally arriving mid-late December.  Growers in the most southerly region of Argentina start their harvest after Christmas, and we continue to deliver fresh cherries by ocean-freight until mid March so our customers have the latest cherries in the world.  Those late season cherries come from a town called ‘Los Antiguos’ and are some of the best tasting cherries we’ve ever experienced.  Warm days, cool nights, clean water and a long growing season make this region very similar to what we see in our own orchards in British Columbia: the best cherries are always the ones that take their time to ripen and develop the perfect balance of sugar and acid.