When I go to the store, cherries are invariably more expensive than bananas. In fact, it’s about an order of magnitude (10 times) more expensive per pound. Even more so for Rainier cherries.
There’s one big player in the space (United Fruit Company, aka Chiquita) so I wonder why they never tried to price fix, like DeBeers. It’s not like a new player in the market can easily supply bananas overnight.
I would guess the demand is fairly price in-elastic. If bananas go up in price by 10%, hardly anyone would notice.
On the flip side, are cherries really that expensive to produce, or is there some price fixing going on?
Last summer (2012) most of the cherry crop in Michigan, which I understand is a primary producer was destroyed. Canned cherries have been virtually impossible to find this summer and probably will be until the new crop is ready.
I suspect the harvesting of cherries is vastly more expensive per pound than harvesting bananas. Bananas can be removed in large bunches and each banana itself has the weight of 10+ cherries. I don’t know if there’s really a good way to harvest cherries other than picking them individually.
There are numerous other factors I don’t know about, things like yield per acre, cost of teh land on which they’re grown, etc.
Supply vs. demand.
[ul]
[li] Worldwide banana production - 55,221,871 metric tonnes (2000)[/li][li] US cherry production - 2012 projected (US is the world’s largest cherry exporter)[/li][LIST]
[li] Sweet - 382,150 tons (up 11 percent from 2011)[/li][li] Tart - 73.1 million pounds (down 68 percent from 2011)[/li][/ul]
Bananas are harder to control than diamonds; diamonds don’t turn brown. If they controlled supply by reducing the number of trees planted, they risk shortages when crop conditions change. You can’t just put bananas in a safe and dribble them out to fix the price.
Besides, maybe they are fixing the price, and $.60/lb is as much as the market will bear?
We grow a lot of cherries here in NW Montana (really) and besides the fact that cherries are picked by hand, they are extremely perishable, so there is relatively short season which limits the supply of fresh cherries.
As someone else already mentioned, cherries are a much smaller crop than bananas and you can get bananas all year round, so there is a constant supply from one place or another.
My guess is that its mainly a supply and demand problem with the demand being fairly high for fresh cherries and the supply being limited to a few months a year.
If they can already sell all of the cherries they produce what incentive would they have to lower the price?
Just a guess here, but there may be more labor involved in harvesting cherries than bananas. Bananas grow in those huge bunches - one swipe with a machete will yield one of these, vs while cherries come, at best, in clumps of a half-dozen or so.
Tart cherries, the kind that go in pies and toppings but are usually not eaten fresh, have been subject to a “federal marketing order” since the Great Depression. This is basically a license for farmers and processors to operate a cartel–The Cherry Industry Administrative Board–that would otherwise be considered an illegal restraint on trade. You can still grow your own tart cherries for your own consumption without regulation, but commercial processors of tart cherries (and indirectly commercial producers) have to abide by their rules. Their rules sometimes requires part of a bumper crop to be left to rot in the orchards, thus driving down supply and raising prices. My understanding is that tart cherries are often much cheaper in Canada which does not have a similar cartel, though I doubt they’re cheaper than bananas. I do not know whether there is a similar cartel for sweet cherries, the kind that are typically eaten fresh like Rainier.
Isn’t it possible that there is a market at work here? Bananas common, plentiful, easy to distribute; cherries not so widely grown, short season, short shelf life.
There is a marketing order for sweet cherries grown in certain counties in Washington State, Marketing Order 923. I don’t know about specific counties, but Washington state has about 37% of the country’s acreage devoted to sweet cherry production. cite (PDF)
And cherries (both Bing and Rainier) are mind-boggling cheap here (like a buck a pound cheap) from roadside stands for a few months out of every year. It’s a little late now for fresh ones, though.
ZenBeam covered it. Cherries are not harvested by hand on small or large trees (small trees are ignored until they grow large enough to harvest mechanically).
The mechanical picker removes all cherries from a tree in about 10 seconds by shaking the main branch. Some time is needed to move the picking mechanism to the next tree. A 3-man operation can harvest many acres in a day.
It’s a long ways from the 1960’s, when I picked cherries by hand along with many other local people, and migrant workers were brought in from Mexico.
Chiquita, Del Monte, Dole, Banacol, Bonita, Rosy, Turbana…that’s off the top of my head.
I’ve been in produce all my life, I’ll bet I’ve seen at least 25-50 different brands but those are all ‘big’ brands. At the very least Chiquita, Del Monte and Dole are ‘huge’. There’s not just one.
From this thread we should change “apples and oranges” to “cherries and bananas”.
Seasonality is a huge factor. I do a lot of shopping in a store that has a great produce section. I can get bananas year around. While the cherry supply was extensive a few months ago, I can’t find them now. (Don’t even want to talk about 2012 when so much of the crop got wiped out by the weather.)
Think about the harvester. The banana producers can draw on labor that is always available and cheap. Harvesting seasonal fruit like cherries means bringing in labor (even with shakers available) on a temporary basis. In those areas that produce fruit a lot of crops are ready for harvesting at the same time. Even hiring cheap labor has to to be relatively expensive. Seasonal laborers in the US have a lot of protections that aren’t present in countries that harvest bananas.
I love fresh cherries. I try not to look at the price.
Actually the Bay Area, but we are a HUGE producer of cherries for the world market.
I’d believe that the main factor in price is little more than fruiting times. Cherries produce one crop a year. In this latitude, (37 N) it begins in May and peaks in early June. There are some crops that are a bit earlier (local) and later, but for the most part, it’s about a 6 week ripening schedule for the fruit.
Here in the heart of cherry production for the United States (sorry Michigan and Washington) the ‘season’ is really about 2 months.
Segue to bananas… tropical and able to flower year around.
TMOTS: Cherries have a defined growing season, bananas (depending on the country) for the most part, do not.
The answer is, yes, there is price fixing. People seem to like to find reasons for the price that aren’t price fixing, though. Not sure why. You should be getting angry at these marketing orders, not finding excuses for them.
Just because this is the Dope… Nope. Washington produces more sweet cherries than California and Michigan put together, and is the single largest producer of sweet cherries. I’m curious as to why California doesn’t have a marketing order, though. They have marketing orders for plenty of other types of produce…
Apples have more defined growing seasons than bananas, but they’re available year-round partly because they survive well in controlled storage. Do cherries not do well in storage?
