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

Written By Helin Sarıgül

One night in April, the thermometer at Stony Point, an orchard site south of Suttons Bay on Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, fell to -7 degrees Celsius. Michigan grows about 70 percent of America's tart cherries, most of them 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, from orchards she reckons can carry about 180.

The same summer, the world grew more fresh cherries than in any year on record. The USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service puts global output for 2026/27 at 5.4 million tonnes, up 17 percent, with Turkey back to about a million tonnes after the frosts that wrecked its 2025 crop. German orchards picked 38,900 tonnes of sweet cherries, 16 percent above the ten-year average, and sweet cherries in German wholesale markets sold below last year's prices for most of the season.

Both are true because the cherry trade is really two trades that barely touch. The sweet cherry is eaten from a bowl. The sour cherry, the Montmorency in Michigan, the Lutówka in Poland, the Érdi bőtermő in Hungary, rarely reaches a fruit counter at all. Across Europe it goes almost entirely to processors, who pit and freeze it, press it into juice and concentrate, or pack it in jars. The sour cherry trade came up short on both sides of the Atlantic, and in America it went into the season with its freezers close to empty.

sour-cherry-shortage-record-crop_01_frost.png: Chart of Michigan orchard frost lows on 19 to 20 April 2026 against the temperatures that kill 10% and 90% of blossoms

EIGHTEEN DEGREES

A cherry flower is at its most exposed 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 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 19 to 20 April, tart and sweet cherries were in bloom across Berrien and Van Buren counties in the southwest, and the lows there ranged from -5.7 °C at Lawrence to about -1.7 °C at the Benton Harbor research centre. In the north the trees were further behind. How much a block lost, Rothwell said later, came down to the stage its buds had reached when the cold arrived.

None of it shows on the outside of the tree. The test is to 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 soaked and collapsed. Then growers count, because a cherry tree carries far more flowers than it needs, and an old rule in Montmorency orchards holds that one live flower in five can still set a full crop. On 5 May the northwest team reported that the trees looked worse than just after the freeze. But they were still finding live flowers in most blocks, so they stuck with the old rule.

sour-cherry-shortage-record-crop_02_supply.png: Card showing a record 2026 world cherry crop while sour cherry harvests fell short in Michigan, Poland and Hungary

The count kept falling. By June, Michigan was expected to harvest less than 50 million pounds of tart cherries, roughly 23,000 tonnes, 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 and Wisconsin a loss of 40 to 50 percent. Dorance Amos, who farms 200 acres of tart cherries in northwest Michigan's Elk Township, 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

Not every loss gives that much warning. California's sweet cherries were lost the other way round: the fruit set, grew, and was ruined in the last weeks. Three rain events in May split fruit 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, with grower losses put at $250 to $300 million. In San Joaquin County the agricultural commissioner reported 63 percent of the crop affected and 174 million dollars lost.

The damage starts long before the rain. A cherry stops laying down its waxy cuticle early in its growth, and the same film is then stretched across a fruit that keeps swelling, until it is covered in cracks too small to see. Rain that sits on a ripe cherry gets in through those cracks. The flesh cells directly underneath take up water and burst, and as they burst they release malic acid, which weakens the walls of the cells beside them. Each failure loads the next, so the split runs across the fruit the way a zipper opens. Researchers have watched this happen in fruit left to soak in water, with the cracking concentrated around the scar at the tip of the cherry. A split cherry cannot be packed, and one California shipper put the cost of a rejected truckload at $100,000 to $150,000.

THE FREEZER WAS ALREADY EMPTY

A sour cherry crop is picked over a few weeks in summer, and the processors who buy it supply food makers all year from cold storage, carrying stock from one season into the next. The American system writes this into federal rules. In heavy years the industry board can set part of the crop aside in an inventory reserve, frozen, canned, dried or as concentrate, and release it when a short crop plus the stock carried in cannot meet demand.

The reserve exists for years like 2026, and the freezers had almost nothing in them. 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 the year worse than the disaster of 2012, because the stock carried in was lower than it was then.

Prices followed. Growers expected about a dollar a pound, against 25 to 50 cents in recent years, and dried cherries could pass $8 a pound wholesale and $10 at retail, against $4.50 two years earlier. Brian pointed out that a restaurant putting dried cherries in a salad can buy 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 that a manufacturer who goes short of cherries in a year of unusually high prices will ask whether cherries belong in the product line at all, and that once the answer is no, the recipe stays changed. The customer has to be won back, and the harvest does not do that on its own. Growers who have long opposed imports now back them: both Brian and Facer said they would support imported fruit this season to keep cherry products on the shelf. Imported frozen tart cherries were projected to cost more than 2 dollars a pound delivered.

TWO THIRDS OF THE JAR

Europe's sour cherry trade is larger, and it divides by what the fruit becomes. Turkey, Poland and Serbia together produce and process 400,000 to 500,000 tonnes in an average year, split roughly evenly between frozen fruit and concentrate. Sour cherries preserved in jars are a different 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 uses, and German canners also buy 5,000 to 7,000 tonnes of Hungarian fruit to fill jars of their own. Almost no other sour cherries are considered suitable for preserving, apart from part of Germany's own crop, so the 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 already stretched. In 2025, European stocks of jarred and frozen sour cherries were used up at the start of the season, frost cut the crop almost everywhere, and prices reached three to four times the average of the previous three years. In June 2026, Hungary's forecast was around 30,000 tonnes, another 20 to 30 percent lower. The frost hit hardest in the northeast, where 55 percent of Hungary's sour cherry orchards stand and where most of the canning capacity sits, and a spring drought followed. Only about a third of the orchards are irrigated.

Germany grows some of its own, on a shrinking area. The final Destatis estimate for 2026 put the German sour cherry harvest at 9,600 tonnes, 16.8 percent below the ten-year average. Yield per hectare was almost normal. The shortfall is land: sour cherry orchards have shrunk from 2,000 to 1,500 hectares 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, so less of the crop could go through the pitting lines and processors were offering only limited volumes.

THE ESTIMATE MOVED FIRST

Sour cherries are bought against a forecast, and the forecasts have a poor recent record. In 2025, Polish estimates early in the season pointed to 80,000 to 90,000 tonnes. 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 take that miss into account when they read Polish forecasts.

In 2026, two informed sources a month apart read the same season differently. 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. A month later, Bösch Boden Spies described Poland as badly frosted and Serbian pitting yields as down, and told customers to secure their volumes early. Both were informed readings of the same orchards. A buyer who signed for frozen pitted sour cherries in June was pricing one of those two readings.

sour-cherry-shortage-record-crop_03_forecast.png: 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 says how many flowers survived. The size of fruit hanging in a Serbian orchard at the end of June says 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 contract can still change.

The growers who came through 2026 best were the ones whose trees didn't all flower at once. 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 argument at national scale: the country's cherry regions are spread widely enough to ripen one after another across 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 builds the intelligence layer for agricultural sourcing.

Notes on facts and sources

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

Helin Sarıgül
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