In the 1990s, sweet cherries were a fledgling crop in B.C. with only $500,000 in annual sales. There weren’t many varieties in the province, and B.C. was locked in competition with Washington state, the biggest producer of sweet cherries in North America. And it was losing the battle.
But when the research centre, which has now bred 80 per cent of the sweet cherry varieties being grown around the world, released the Staccato variety for commercial planting in the 2000s, it changed the game for the province.
With a deeply red skin and sweet taste, Staccato cherries are not ripe for picking until August much later than the harvest season for popular varieties from Washington state. This opened up a whole new market for B.C.’s sweet cherries and transformed them into a multimillion-dollar industry. Today, almost all of Canada’s sweet cherries are grown in the Okanagan.
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