Welcome to Cherry Times
Source: Stefano Lugli
Yakima, Washington, is an agricultural powerhouse. It grows about three-fourths of the hops in the United States, is a major wine region, and produces many apples and cherries. Washington and California have an odd beef over cherry stems. Washington prides itself on cherries with beautiful, intact stems, while sometimes looking down on California cherries.
Cherries move through the conveyor belt system while floating in cold water. The water keeps them cold, firm, and crisp, and washes away lighter items like leaves, sand, and sticks. The cherries continue along different conveyor belts and are ultimately sent down thin channels that can hold only one or two cherries across their width. They then enter a sophisticated vision-system-based sorting and grading system (the blue box near the top of the image, toward the end of this video shot by Rhishi Pethe).
Ellips’ cherry grader captures 30 images2 of every cherry with three synchronized cameras, capturing color, infrared, and a filtered monochrome channel for defect contrast. Each camera fires 10 times as the fruit rotates. The machine analyzes size, color, multiple defect types, cherry firmness, handling defects like bruising, and other factors. The computers that monitor and control the operation provide a real-time view of what it has “seen.”
30 images of every cherry
The machine analyzes size, color, several types of defects, firmness, bruising, and other factors.
Some systems, like the Unitec vision system, read ripeness and sugar content (also known as Brix) non-destructively by analyzing cherry images. It segments cherries by eating quality, not just appearance. These systems can process 20 tons of cherries per hour.
With a few taps on the screens, the machine can tweak what it measures and, most importantly, how it categorizes each cherry based on those measurements. As you can see in the picture, about a third of the cherries were culled when I visited the pack house.
The packing facility works only 6–8 weeks a year, during the cherry harvest season.
For the other 44–46 weeks of the year, the packing facility stays idle, and routine preventive and necessary maintenance is performed to prepare it for the next season. This multi-million-dollar machine is utilized only 2/12, or 16.6%. The machine stays idle for the rest of the time (about 83.4%).
Reported utilization: 2/12, or 16.6%. The machine remains idle for about 83.4% of the time.
The system can track each cherry and physically send it to the right bin based on its categorization. A simple software program, run by their operations manager, controls the entire process based on the latest needs from their customers.
The technology for quality assessment and sorting cherries is amazing; it is even more interesting to understand the implications for the business.
A pristine cherry that can survive a long journey gets marked for the export market for buyers willing to pay a premium. If a cherry has very few visible defects and is crisp with the color the buyer wants, it might go to the Whole Foods category.
Before optical grading, pack-houses used mechanical sizing.
Accuracy figures as reported in the original text.
This lets every cherry be graded on its own merits, including defects, appearance, scratches, stem quality, and sweetness. Basically, cherries can be graded and priced like an airline prices every seat within its class and optimizes fare classes.
Before optical grading, “quality” was a quasi-informed assertion done by the packer and shipper. Traditional human hand-packers graded fruit mostly on visible size and glaring rot.
A picked cherry loses quality by the hour. Vision-based dynamic class segmentation enables shipping first-class cherries with dark color, perfect stems, and high firmness, and airfreighting them to China or Vietnam, where consumers pay $15–$25 per pound for a high-status gift.
Optical sorting lets buyers contract for consistent cherry quality. Before optimal sorting, buyers had to inspect batches visually and risk inconsistent quality. Now, with optical sorting, a buyer in Shanghai or Chengdu can confidently contract for a container of “Grade A, 28-30 mm diameter, 18+ Brix with less than 2% cosmetic defect” cherries. Containerization and optical systems provide a trusted, repeatable standardization required for global B2B commodity trading.
It has allowed Chile to capitalize on out-of-season demand (out of season for the Northern Hemisphere) and increase exports almost 6-fold over the last decade. Precision sorting unlocked counter-seasonal trade, allowing Northern Hemisphere consumers in North America/Europe to access Chilean cherries from November through February.
Chile’s cherry harvest runs from November to February, whereas China’s runs from May through June. So abundant Chilean cherries land right around the Chinese Lunar New Year (between late January and mid-February) when there is a gap in domestic cherry supply for China.
In Chinese culture, red signals luck, roundness signals completeness, and the price makes it a clear status gift. For almost a decade, the Chile-to-China cherry trade ran on a delicately balanced calendar. Cherries ripen in December in Chile, then are rushed across the Pacific to arrive in the two-week pre-holiday window and sell at a peak.
The huge value proposition of the cherries coming before the Lunar New Year was that they arrive on a fixed date as a premium gift. If the cherry arrives soft, lacerated, or late, it is worthless and fails as a gift. But a reliable vision system makes arrival possible, with consistent quality over long distances. It is possible to ship cherries by sea for 21–23 days because every cherry in the box and the container is structurally sound and at peak taste.
Chilean exporters have maintained a direct shipping route to China. The direct route cut shipping time from 30 to 23 days. Cherry shipping capacity doubled in 2025. In 2026, more than four weeks before the Lunar New Year, Chilean cherries were widely available in China, with prices 40% lower for premium red, round, beautiful-looking cherries.
Vision systems began as labor-efficient, consistent, high-throughput systems for sorting, packing, and shipping cherries. The precision of these systems has enabled differential pricing, giving customers the product they need at the price they care about. This has reduced waste by matching each cherry to the right customer and use. However, they may have reduced cherries’ allure a bit, as they are now more widely available.
Vision systems, combined with containerization and fast yet inexpensive supply chains, have made cherries more accessible to many customers when they value them most.