—story by Ross Courtney
—photo by TJ Mullinax
The redhead will return.
Promoters with Northwest Cherries consider 2024 a marketing success and plan to repeat a lot of the techniques in 2025.
That includes the stock image, found by a hired graphic designer, of an anonymous red-haired woman who seems extremely happy with her bowl full of cherries.
“We’re going to stick with the redhead,” said Karley Lange, Northwest Cherries director of domestic promotions. Lange will reuse the image and the color scheme but not the accompanying 2024 tagline “Ooh La La,” a nod to the Paris Olympics.
The redhead — that’s her natural hair color, by the way — was just one of several marketing stories from January’s 82nd annual Cherry Institute, held in Yakima, Washington, by the Washington State Fruit Commission, which operates Northwest Cherries and publishes Good Fruit Grower. Others included a Korean-American mother turned social media influencer, health messaging reaching new households, and pink, cherry-covered commuter trains in Bangkok, Thailand.
If the disastrous 2023 cherry season — marked by a compressed harvest and major overlap with California shippers — taught anything, it was the importance of advertising, said B.J. Thurlby, president of Northwest Cherries, which collectively promotes cherries from five states.
California learned that, too. The state boosted its advertising in 2024, especially late in its season, around Memorial Day and early June, Thurlby said. Northwest Cherries also boosted 2024 advertising, especially in early June, the start of the Northwest season. Fortunately, Northwest shippers had early volume to support that strategy.
The early advertising created momentum that continued and climbed through the week of July 4, typically the peak sales period, resulting in a decent year overall.
The industry is entering an era of 20-million-box crop averages, which requires a detailed promotion plan every year and retail advertising to go along with large displays, Thurlby said. A lot of the advertising includes health messaging, such as inflammation reduction and cancer suppression. Northwest Cherries helps fund such research.
“We can’t get through a Northwest cherry season without ad support from these different retailers,” Thurlby said. “They’ve got 2,000 or more items in their produce departments, and we’re trying to rise above 1,999 other items.”
Marketing goes hand in hand with volume forecasts, Thurlby said.
The 2024 crop was larger than predicted … sort of. In early spring, the Northwest Cherries estimation team first put it at about 19 million boxes. Growers then brought that down at the annual five-state meeting, but estimates kept creeping back up until it ended at 19.5 million.
Thurlby cautioned against purposely erring on the small side. It prompts retailers to promote a different fruit, worried that they won’t be able to deliver on cherry advertisements.
“We think we’re better off with an estimate,” he said.
Lange had good things to say about a few online promotions with key retailers, especially Kroger. The stores sold $3 million worth of Northwest cherries during a seven-week online ad campaign and reached nearly 200,000 households, 605 of them new, according to Kroger’s data. During two of those seven weeks, cherries sold for 63 times the cost of the advertising. Kroger considers 24 times a key benchmark.
“That was a huge success this season,” Lange said. “We definitely will be doing this again next season.”
Analyses of Walmart and Sam’s Club promotions indicated new cherry buyers and an increase in sales over the previous year.
Health-related advertising works, Lange said, and she has analysis by a hired market research company to back up her claim. Two sponsored articles touting cherry health benefits were picked up by Parade, delish and Vanity Fair magazines. Northwest Cherries spent between $5,000 and $6,000 on the sponsored articles but returned a value equivalent to $411,000 in purchased advertising.
Lange also organized a localized promotion with a cherry-
focused menu at Troutdale, Oregon, restaurant Sugarpine Drive-In. The Cherries Jubilee ice cream dessert was mentioned in The New York Times and sampled by social media influencer @TheKoreanMama, an unpretentious woman from the Portland area who visits restaurants and food vendors with her son. Jan Kim (her real name) was far and away Northwest Cherries’ most viewed social media influencer.
The whole world got a load of the redhead in 2024, said Keith Hu, international operations director for Northwest Cherries.
Hu liked the domestic campaign design so much, he used it overseas, deploying pink food trucks to hand out cherry samples at supermarkets in and around Seoul, South Korea. Many of the stores coordinated their displays. He also plans to repeat the imagery in 2025.
Hu decked out commuter trains in Bangkok with cherry branding, exposing 2.85 million middle-class riders — with money to spend on quality produce — to the pink background and smiling redhead every day. East Asian shoppers don’t always see so much color and excitement in advertising, Hu said.
“They just like the whole pinkness,” Hu said to Good Fruit Grower. “It really stands out.”
Northwest companies exported 5.8 million boxes, or 30 percent of the crop, Hu said. That’s about his goal every year. Total export cherry FOB value was $284 million at the warehouses in 2024, higher than the previous year, Hu said, even though the volume was smaller.
The international buyers wanted more, Hu said. In fact, the only complaint he heard was that he ran out of cherries to ship later in the season. Some northern and higher-elevation regions of Washington, which harvest later, were hit by heavy winter damage in January 2024 and did not harvest full crops.
“The quality is so good, the demand is so high everywhere around the world,” Hu said at the Cherry Institute.
Canada repeated as the top export market, with China again coming in second. Taiwan, South Korea and Mexico rounded out the top five.
All in all, he called 2024 a “fun” year in international marketing campaigns. •
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