Sweet Cherry Research Part 2

Sweet Cherry Research Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. We began chatting with Carolyn Ross, Assistant Professor, Food Science & Human Nutrition with WSU about research being done on sweet cherries and in particular about how consumers react to cherries with and without stems. ROSS: There was a significant difference but it wasn't huge. Statistically it was different because we had a lot of people doing the study but as far as practically speaking people really liked the stem free cherries. But they liked the stemmed cherries just a little bit more at least based on acceptance, there was no difference based on flavor and taste. WSU has been looking at different harvesting techniques that would pull the cherries from the stems instead of harvesting with the stem on. Ross' job was to find out whether consumers would have any kind of aversion to a bowl of cherries without stems. ROSS: I think that it would help with production if they could produce these stem free cherries and I don't think it makes much of a difference to the consumers whether they get cherries with the stems or without the stems. They still accept them. I always had an issue with paying a per pound rate for cherries AND the stems which I was going to throw away. ROSS: We asked based on appearance and based on flavor, would you pay $2.99 for a pound of these cherries? And if they said yes, we would ask them would you pay slightly more like $3.49 and if they said "no" we would say would you pay slightly less, $1.99? So trying to get a feel for how much the people would pay for the cherries. Ross has a lot of other data that she and her team are in the process of crunching so we will update you when it is available. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.