Fifth-generation Washington farmer Tate Mathison and his father, Kyle Mathison, are bringing new meaning to the term “cherry picking.”
For over a decade, the Mathisons have grown and sourced ultra-premium cherries for Stemilt Growers under the Kyle’s Pick brand. But what began as a “pet project” has evolved into something much more, says the younger Mathison of his father’s namesake cherries. Now backed by science and empirical data, the family says it’s bringing consistently “world famous” cherries to market each season.
For Tate Mathison, who grew up working alongside his father on his family’s Wenatchee, Wash.-based Stemilt Hill cherry orchards, knowing where to find the best fruit has long been second nature, but how best to communicate that knowledge to his retail customers was a question that needed an answer.
“I remember thinking, ‘these cherries are so amazing, but how do I really communicate to my customer that these are super-duper?’ You can do it by size, but that doesn’t ensure that the cherries are the best, because you can get big cherries that just taste OK — but some taste amazing,” he says. “So, we wanted to ensure that … and to communicate to the end consumer that Kyle’s Pick are the cherries we’d be looking for if we were shopping for cherries.”
What began as cherry picking the best of the best by instinct is now a data-driven and highly selective quality control process that aims to deliver fruit that meets ultra-premium standards for size, firmness, color and flavor.
“The essence of Kyle’s Pick was that, as a fifth-generation cherry grower, I can go on any orchard and tell you if there’s going to be good cherries, and then if there is, I’ll know exactly where to get them on every single tree,” says Mathison. “That was the spirit of the program and we’ve gotten better and better at it over the years to where now we feel we have coupled the passion of what my dad’s been doing as a fourth-generation cherry grower with the science and the empirical data of the fruit.
“Today, it’s now a huge, multidepartment process,” he continues. “Dozens of people are involved in the selection process itself, and there’s a huge amount of effort to ensure that Kyle’s Pick delivers that same eating experience every time.”
Premium Picking
Mathison says varieties are the foundation of a premium cherry program.
“With cherries you’re going to pick that tree one time and when it’s picked, it’s done,” he says. “And specific cherry varieties are grown in locations to extend the season from the first week of May to the first week of September. You have all these varieties staggered throughout the season and some varieties can be excellent and some can be pretty good at their best.
“What Kyle’s Pick does is take only certain varieties that can be ultra-premium — [bing, sweetheart, skeena and Staccato] — that’s the first thing, and that baseline is based off our generations of cherry growing and scouring the globe for varieties,” says Mathison. “We set the bar at these varieties for Kyle’s Pick, and then once the varieties are chosen, we map out when those varieties will pick and where.”
From here, Mathison says the field staff team comes in to identify the growers “doing the right stuff” to cultivate ultra-premium varieties.
“The top level narrows down by the grower and how good they are,” he says. “Because it takes no skill to pick a cherry early, but it takes all the skill in the world — and all of the hutzpah — to pick it when it’s ripe, because all the risk now belongs to the grower.
“You pick a cherry five or six days early, sure it’s red. It tastes OK. It’s going to make it through the packing process, but it’s not going to delight consumers with excellence,” he says. “It’s just going to be a cherry.”
The field team then passes the baton to the R&D team, who collect data from the orchards that show premium potential. Each lot undergoes a rigorous quantitative analysis and is given a score based on Kyle’s Pick proprietary scoring system. Only cherries that earn a 90 or higher make the grade.
“They’re out there scouting ahead and pulling samples as harvest is starting to come along, and then it gets passed off to our QA (quality assurance) team,” says Mathison. “As the grower goes into harvest the fruit, we take multiple field samples throughout the day. One grower lot might get six to 10 field samples done by our team and they run the full gamut — size, color, firmness, sugar, defect, stem quality, etc. — throughout the day. So, we have a very good understanding of the fruit as it’s getting picked.”
Once the data on each grower lot is uploaded to the system, the team ranks them.
“It’s just like March Madness,” says Mathison. “All those growers get ranked, and we’re looking at the qualities and the varieties, and then we have notes from the R&D team, and we have this cherry meeting that we love. Then we start to qualify the grower lots of what will be Kyle’s Pick.”
Limited-Time Offer
Mathison says while Kyle’s Pick aims to deliver on a promise to the consumer with every bite, time is of the essence with a seasonal fruit like cherries.
“You have May, June, July and August — four months,” says Mathison. “And in those four months, how many times are they going to the store? How many times are we going to be on promotion with a lot of volume? How many times are we going to be able to delight someone with something they’ve never experienced before?
“Because cherries have that ability,” he continues. “There’s only a handful of fruit that really can do it, and that’s really what we’re trying to do with Kyle’s Pick — to give someone a taste of something that’s just like, ‘Wow.’”
Because of these rigorous standards, there may be pauses in supply of Kyle’s Pick to its retail customers, says Brianna Shales, Stemilt’s marketing director, who adds “it’s all part of keeping the bar high.”
But having cultivated and selected cherries for the Kyle’s Pick program since 2013, Mathison says his family continues to build on volume and quality.
“You have to have a large block of premium fruit to start with before you can even attempt something like Kyle’s Pick,” he says. “That’s why it’s taken 10 years to really get to the point where we feel like, hey, we’ve got the world’s best cherries; we’ve got to tell the universe.”
But the volume is limited, says Mathison, who on June 20 when he spoke with The Packer, was packing only a couple hundred boxes of Kyle’s Pick a day out of about 70,000 boxes packed a day.
“It’s a pretty small amount now, however, my dad starts to pick next week and my brother is picking now, so in about seven or eight days, we’ll be harvesting two or three varieties that are really superior.”
And the market demand for a premium fruit experience is strong, he says.
“We found that the marketplace desires something like Kyle’s Pick. Retailers want to have something special to give to their guests. And the end consumer is super hungry for it as well,” he says. “If you have a customer that actually puts cherries on the list, it’s a pretty well-informed customer already and they’re probably willing to pay a little bit more for an experience that is mind blowing.”
A 1-pound clamshell of Kyle’s Pick cherries retail for between $3.99 and $5.99, depending on the market, says Shales.
Mathison expects they’ll ship around 200,000 boxes of Kyle’s Pick this season out of a total of 3.5 million to 4 million boxes of Washington cherries.
Generations in the Making
What does it mean to bring a cherry named for your father to market and how do you plan to carry the legacy forward as a fifth-generation cherry grower?
“It’s very humbling, because what we’re doing is not built in one lifetime,” says Mathison. “You can look within Stemilt the company and in the farms we have and you can see that the fingerprints of generations past.”
From his great-great-grandfather, who first homesteaded on the property, to his grandfather, who applied for and received the last point of diversion off the Columbia River in 1978, allowing his ancestors to irrigate the orchards, Mathison says he and his brother have been set up for success.
“It’s like they put us on the 10-yard line to score and to be successful,” he says. “They did most of the work, and now it’s just up to me to give my best effort to the next point of the legacy, to hopefully improve it — to hopefully grow it in a way that’s helpful to our community and to the folks who are part of our company.”
Mathison says the sixth generation — his and his brother’s children — are already involved in the family business and excited to be a part of it.
“My kids see what my dad is doing, and they’re like, ‘I want to be like that. I want to do that. That looks fun.’ You know what? It looks fun to me too,” he says.
