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Nature gives the flavour,
technology preserves it

Cherries as fresh and firm as if just picked from the tree.

A cherry’s flavour is created on the tree, and we pick it by hand only when it is fully ripe. From that moment on, technology takes over and preserves its freshness, firmness and quality all the way to you.

How our process
works

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    Hand picking

    All our cherries are picked by hand only, without harvesting machines. Each fruit is picked carefully to preserve its natural firmness, appearance and quality.

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    Hydrocooler

    Right after picking, the cherries pass through a hydrocooler – an “ice rain” that brings the fruit down to about 5 °C in a very short time. This slows ripening, extends freshness and keeps the fruit firm.

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    Drying

    After rapid cooling, the cherries are dried to remove any remaining water and moisture from their surface. They then move on to the sorting line, where detailed inspection and grading begin.

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    Inspection table

    At the inspection table, split, damaged and any other fruit that doesn’t meet our quality criteria is removed by hand.

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    Sorting

    A camera system analyses the fruit and grades it by size, from Ø18 to Ø28 mm. Cherries larger than Ø26 mm are set aside as Premium class, while fruit from Ø18 to Ø24 mm is graded as Class I.

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    Weighing and packing

    Sorted cherries are distributed to nine separate outlets, where they go straight into transport boxes and are automatically weighed to 5 or 6 kg, depending on the customer’s requirements. At every outlet our staff check the appearance and quality of the fruit once more. Class I cherries are set aside and hand-packed in 250 g retail punnets.

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    Cold rooms and
    the cold chain to the customer

    Demand during the harvest is so high that the cherries hardly spend any time in the cold rooms. With our own refrigerated trucks we keep the cold chain unbroken and deliver them straight to the shops, as fresh as when they left our facility.

26,000 trees,
20 cherry varieties

Our plantation has around 26,000 cherry trees of 20 different varieties, carefully chosen to ripen at different times.

Because the varieties ripen at different times, our fresh cherry season lasts more than a month. The harvest usually starts between 10 and 15 May and ends between 20 and 25 June, depending on the weather and the year.

This ripening schedule lets us harvest and deliver fresh cherries continuously throughout the season, picking each variety at the moment of optimal ripeness.

20 varieties, in order of ripening

mid-May → end of June

  1. Early Biggi
  2. Sweet Early
  3. Early Burlat
  4. Sweet Aryana
  5. Sweet Lorenz
  6. Grace Star
  7. Carmen
  8. Samba
  9. Giorgia
  10. Christalina
  11. Lapins
  12. Summit
  13. Burlat
  14. Sweet Valina
  15. Sunburst
  16. Germesdorfska
  17. Volovsko srce
  18. Ferrovia
  19. Regina
  20. Kordia

We set aside the best fruit of every harvest for La Cherry, our premium line of cherry products.

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