You can't tell a customer to come back next year: the sour cherry gap

Written By Helin Sarıgül
Orchard in full white blossom at dusk, with frost on the grass between the rows.

One night in April, the thermometer at Stony Point, an orchard site south of Suttons Bay on Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, dropped to −8 °C (18 °F). Michigan grows about 70 percent of the US tart cherry crop, most of it in this corner of the state. In July, Nikki Rothwell, who runs Michigan State University's horticultural research station in Leelanau County, put the northwest's harvest at around 40 million pounds. She estimates the orchards there can carry about 180 million.

That same summer, the world grew more fresh cherries than ever before. The USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service puts global output for 2026/27 at a record 5.4 million metric tons, up 17 percent, with Turkey back to about a million tons after the frosts that wrecked its 2025 crop. German orchards picked 38,900 metric tons of sweet cherries, 16.2 percent above the ten-year average, and for most of the season sweet cherries sold for less on German wholesale markets than they had a year earlier.

Both things are true because cherries are really two trades that barely touch. Sweet cherries get eaten out of a bowl. Sour cherries, the Montmorency in Michigan, the Lutówka in Poland, the Érdi bőtermő in Hungary, almost never make it to a fruit counter. In Europe nearly all of them go to processors, who pit and freeze them, press them into juice and concentrate, or pack them in jars. In 2026 the sour cherry crop came up short on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the US the freezers that should have covered the gap were already close to empty.

Chart of Michigan orchard frost lows on April 19 to 20, 2026 against the temperatures that kill 10% and 90% of blossoms

INSIDE THE BUD

A cherry flower is most vulnerable in the few days it stands open. Michigan State's extension team publishes the thresholds in its spring bulletins: at first and full bloom, a tart cherry tree loses 10 percent of its flowers at −2.2 °C (28 °F) and 90 percent at −4.4 °C (24 °F). On the night of April 19, tart and sweet cherries were in bloom across Berrien and Van Buren counties in the southwest of the state. Lows that night ranged from −5.7 °C (21.7 °F) at Lawrence, well past the 90 percent line, to about −1.7 °C (29 °F) at the Benton Harbor research center, just above the 10 percent one. Farther north the trees were less advanced. How much any one block lost, Rothwell said later, came down to how far along its buds were when the cold arrived.

None of this shows on the outside of the tree. To find out, you slice through a bud and look at the tissue where the fruit would form. Living tissue is green to pale yellow and moist. Dead tissue has turned brown or black and looks waterlogged and collapsed. Then growers count. A cherry tree carries far more flowers than it needs, and an old rule in Montmorency orchards says that one live flower in five can still set a full crop. On May 5, the northwest team reported that the tart cherries looked worse than they had right after the freeze. Most blocks still had live flowers, though, and by the one-in-five rule that could still be enough.

Card showing a record 2026 world cherry crop while sour cherry harvests fell short in Michigan, Poland and Hungary

It wasn't. By June, Michigan was expected to harvest less than 50 million pounds of tart cherries, roughly 23,000 metric tons, against a typical 170 to 200 million. Utah, the second-largest producer, was put at essentially zero. New York expected less than half a normal crop, Wisconsin a loss of 40 to 50 percent. Dorance Amos, who farms 200 acres of tart cherries in Elk Township in northwest Michigan, expected about 50,000 pounds from blocks that usually give him a million. "All regions are smoked from frost," he told reporters.

RAIN ON A RIPE CHERRY

California lost its sweet cherries the opposite way. The fruit set, grew, and was ruined in the final weeks. Three rainstorms in May split cherries on the tree, and the state finished at around 5.5 million 18-pound boxes, against a pre-season estimate of 8 to 8.5 million. Grower losses were put at $250 million to $300 million. In San Joaquin County alone, the agricultural commissioner reported 63 percent of the crop affected and $174 million lost.

The damage starts long before the rain. Early in its growth, a cherry stops making new cuticle, the waxy film that covers its skin. From then on that same film has to stretch over a fruit that keeps swelling, until it's covered in cracks too small to see. When rain sits on a ripe cherry, water gets in through those cracks. The cells just beneath soak it up and burst, and as they burst they release malic acid, which weakens the walls of the cells next to them. Each cell that fails puts more strain on the next, and the split runs across the fruit like a zipper opening. Researchers have watched it happen in cherries left to soak, with the cracks concentrated around the small scar at the tip of the fruit. A split cherry can't be packed. One California shipper put the cost of a rejected truckload at $100,000 to $150,000.

THE FREEZER WAS ALREADY EMPTY

Sour cherries are picked over a few weeks in summer. The processors who buy them supply food manufacturers all year from cold storage, carrying stock from one season into the next. In the US, federal rules build that buffer in: in heavy years, the industry board can set part of the crop aside as an inventory reserve, frozen, canned, dried or as concentrate, and release it when a short crop plus the carried-over stock can't meet demand.

The reserve exists for years like 2026. This year there was almost nothing in it. At the end of April, tart cherries in storage were within 4 million pounds of the all-time low set in 1977, according to Tim Brian of Smeltzer Orchards. Tom Facer, a New York agent who has handled tart cherries since 1983, called it worse than the disaster of 2012, because less stock was carried in this time.

Prices followed. Growers expected about a dollar a pound, against 25 to 50 cents in recent years. Dried cherries could top $8 a pound wholesale and $10 at retail, up from $4.50 two years earlier. Brian pointed out that a restaurant putting dried cherries in a salad can switch to cranberries for perhaps a quarter of the cost.

"Our processors are scared we're going to lose this market next year because we cannot begin to fill all of the orders," Amos said. Facer's warning was about the manufacturer who runs short of cherries in a year of unusually high prices. That buyer starts asking whether cherries belong in the product line at all, and once the answer is no, the recipe stays changed. A good harvest next year won't bring that customer back on its own. Growers who have long opposed imports now back them: Brian and Facer both said they would support imported fruit this season to keep cherry products on the shelf. Imported frozen tart cherries were expected to cost more than $2 a pound delivered.

TWO THIRDS OF GERMANY'S JARS

Europe's sour cherry trade is bigger, and it splits by what the fruit becomes. In an average year, Turkey, Poland and Serbia together grow and process 400,000 to 500,000 metric tons, divided roughly evenly between frozen fruit and concentrate. Jarred sour cherries are a separate market. Hungary fills 30 to 60 million jars a year, 60 to 70 percent of European production, and Germany is second with 15 to 20 million. Three quarters of Hungary's jars go to Germany, where they cover about two thirds of what the country eats, and German canners buy another 5,000 to 7,000 metric tons of Hungarian fruit to fill jars of their own. Apart from part of Germany's own crop, almost no other sour cherries are considered suitable for jarring. Hungarian growers and the Hungarian and German canneries depend on each other almost entirely. The trade journal Cherry Times calls it a bilateral monopoly.

That market was stretched before this year began. In 2025, European stocks of jarred and frozen sour cherries ran out at the start of the season, frost cut the crop almost everywhere, and prices climbed to three to four times the average of the previous three years. In June 2026, Hungary was forecasting around 30,000 metric tons, another 20 to 30 percent below 2025. The frost hit hardest in the northeast, home to 55 percent of the country's sour cherry orchards and most of its canning capacity, and a spring drought followed. Only about a third of the orchards are irrigated.

Germany grows some of its own, on less and less land. The final Destatis estimate put the 2026 German sour cherry harvest at 9,600 metric tons, 16.8 percent below the ten-year average. Yields per hectare were close to normal. The loss is in the orchards themselves, which shrank from 2,000 hectares to 1,500 in a decade.

On the frozen side, the Hamburg ingredients supplier Bösch Boden Spies reported in late July that the Polish crop could come in 20 to 50 percent below its long-term average after spring frosts, with the worst damage in the southeast and parts of Mazovia. In Serbia, its team found trees heavy with fruit, but the cherries were small. Less of the crop could go through the pitting lines, and processors were offering only limited volumes.

BUYING AGAINST A FORECAST

Sour cherries are bought against a forecast, and the forecasts have a poor recent track record. Early in the 2025 season, Polish estimates pointed to 80,000 to 90,000 metric tons. Poland harvested 144,000. Prices opened high and had halved by the end of the season, and Cherry Times reports that traders in Hungary and across Europe now factor that miss in whenever they read a Polish forecast.

In 2026, two well-placed sources a month apart read the same season in opposite ways. In late June, the Hungarian analysis in Cherry Times expected good harvests in Turkey, Serbia and Poland to keep frozen fruit and concentrate in ample supply. In late July, Bösch Boden Spies described Poland as badly frosted and Serbian pitting yields as down, and told customers to lock in their volumes early. A buyer who signed for frozen pitted sour cherries in June was pricing in one of those two readings, without knowing which would hold.

Bar chart comparing Poland's early 2025 sour cherry forecast of 80,000 to 90,000 tonnes with the 144,000 tonnes harvested

What we see at Finches, across commodities, is that the harvest estimate is the first thing a buyer trades on, and that the signals behind it exist weeks before any estimate is published. A blade through a bud in April tells you how many flowers survived. The size of the fruit hanging in a Serbian orchard at the end of June tells you what the pitting yield will be. Those readings sit in extension bulletins and supplier visit notes, in several languages, and they rarely reach the person signing the contract while the terms can still change.

NOT ALL AT ONCE

The growers who came through 2026 best were the ones whose trees didn't all bloom at the same time. Doug DeBadts, who grows tart cherries in Wayne County, New York, has one orchard within three miles of Lake Ontario that blooms about a week and a half later than his inland blocks, and he believes that helped. Turkish exporters make the same case at national scale: the country's cherry regions are spread out enough to ripen one after another over an eight- to ten-week season. The jar has no such spread. Two thirds of the sour cherries in Germany's jars come from Hungary, and much of that from its frost-hit northeast.

Finches is sourcing intelligence for agricultural raw materials.

Notes on facts and sources

All figures below were checked against the named source on September 30, 2026. Figures marked preliminary were the source's estimates at the time of publication and may have been revised since.

Helin Sarıgül
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