For any of you who have spent some time with Koreans, you’ll know that Koreans love to eat fruit rather than processed dessert after meals. Today’s Yakima Herald-Republic reports that Washington State cherry growers have turned this habit into jobs and revenue.
Per the article:
Most of the [Korean] shoppers stop what they’re doing as the woman gestures to a plate of dark red fruit and neon green toothpicks.
She urges them to take a bite. These are fresh cherries, she says.
For many of these shoppers, that one bite is all it takes. Next to the sampling area they pick up a heart-shaped box of Bing cherries. They don’t even wince at the price — more than 13,000 Korean won — pronounced “wan” — which is nearly $13 in U.S. currency, for less than a pound of fruit….
…With Korean consumers willing to pay $10 to $13 or more a pound for large, quality cherries, including Bing, Chelan and Sweetheart varieties, South Korea may help the industry through what has been a difficult harvest season so far.
But now Koreans can’t get enough of them. In 2007, the value of all fresh cherries shipped to South Korea more than doubled over the previous year to nearly $32 million. At more than $11 million, Pacific Northwest cherries got about a third of that business and had nearly three times the number of 20-pound boxes exported to South Korea than a year ago.
$13 for less than a pound of fruit! Well, good for those Washington State cherry growers! However, they are lucky that they 1) don’t directly compete with any domestic fruit growers and 2) don’t (currently) have an obscure, but deadly, disease that is virtually impossible to get ascribed to their product otherwise, they may have this or this happen to them.
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
“The whole country is a single gossip network,” said Clark W. Sorensen,
How right he is. Word of mouth is very important and spreads very fast. Whole fads can be started and can be ended very quickly. It also explains the beef fiasco, and why such pyramid businesses that sell to families, friends and colleagues, like Amway, does very well (more so than other countries).
Would the FTA help or hurt these farmers?
Let’s not forgot the 10,000 won avacado and mango – granted, the avacado finds few fans in Korea, which is a pity, but a tasty Thai mango is almost is good as a Washington cherry.
Are fruits that “don’t compete” still taxed at ridiculous rates?
BTW, what’s up w/ Koreans and berries? Other than strawberries I’ve found no one who likes the others. I had a whole mulberry tree to myself in Korea; recall Koreans found it odd that I was picking them.
“granted, the avacado finds few fans in Korea”
I knew someone who spent 9 years in Japan… and it was a 9 year exile from root beer floats… the Japanese, for whatever reason, hates root beer.
He went everywhere in Tokyo to get root beer and he didn’t have an army base nearby to shop at…
Koreans don’t like root beer either.
To Koreans it smells like the medicinal patch that you put on to alleviate sore muscles.
You mean Salon Pas (which is a Japanese product)?
Something like that.
Yeah, my dad describes it exactly like that as well. That’s why I always get 6 packs of root beer whenever they buy ‘assorted soft drinks’ from Costco. Hooray for partially mooching from parents.
What?! Something wonderful which doesn’t have a Korean origin?! WTF?
And $13-a-pound for something nice… isn’t the going rate for Nice Things™ around $16/lb.?
$13 for Cherries? Ridiculous, at my local supermarket I can get nice large sweet cherries on sale $3 a pound.
Isn’t Maine lobster $10-12/lbs?
Next time I ask a lovely Koean girl, “may I have your cherry?” will I get slapped?
Provided you find an adult Korean chick who still has her cherry…
More likely, she’ll ask you for 200-300 won in exchange for that one Washington State grown cherry.
Well, they can all be envious of me cause I can go to my neighborhood shooper and pick up an apple for 1,300 won.
What’s a “shooper?”
Thai Mangoes are pathetic compared to the mangoes grown in the Northern Territory, Australia. Huge, golden super juicy and sweet, just hope those babies don’t get exported, more for the locals.
It’s amazing how much ‘savy’ Korean shoppers pay for Korean beef (it’s the best) dodgy herbal medicines, blended whiskey, hagwons etc.
#12,
You’re a sucker if you pay more than 6-8$/lbs for lobster.
at first I was pretty horrified by cherry prices here (heck, at home in WA I was once paid by a neighbor to take her cherries away – there were too many, and she wanted them off the tree and eaten rather than off the tree rotting on the ground attracting birds) but they’re an awfully finicky product to ship – very delicate, quick to spoil. And besides, that’s the sparkling supermarket price. My local market has them for about 5,000 won a pound. They started at 8,000 earlier in the season, but dropped to 6,000 pretty quickly.
Those Northwest Cherry Growers sure have a funny definition of “major contributor.” $750 million in total sales. $11 million attributed to Korea. That would be less than 1.5%.
Hey, I just gave $100 to John McCain. I’m a major contributor!
Why did you emphasize those numbers anyway? Given the tiny slice of the pie Korea represents and given that you seemed to be focusing on the Korean contribution and not the industry as a whole, the numbers you should have emphasized were $11 million, and 615 jobs (if you take 1.5% of 41,000 jobs). But then I guess this wouldn’t be much of a post if your lede was “Korea contributed to 615 jobs in the Pacific Northwest. Film at 11!”
Come on WK, people come here to get away from, or laugh at, the over-exaggerations of the Korean media…not see poorly veiled clones.
# 20,
I’m not a U.S. cherry industry expert. Just quoting the article… and I bolded the data points to make it easier for lazy, scanning eyes.
Entirely possible Korea’s share is only 1.5%. I honestly don’t know. If you are upset over jumbled or misrepresented facts, write to the quoted local paper.
them are some damn nice cherries. when i was living in korea i used to buy them on a regular basis at shinsegae. expensive but delicious.
and korean cherries are indeed quite sensitive. i used to pick up the older cherries which were about half the price of the fresher, juicier ones. juicier than than the younger ones but not as appealing to the eye.
Senator McCain’s campaign must be in trouble, if their entire budget is little over $6000.
The local Safeway (meaning the one located nearest to the campus that raises its price to rip off lazy college students) sells them at about $6.99~$7.99/lbs. $10~$13 isn’t that far away, if you think about S & H.
Lazy, scanning eyes would take away $750 mil and 41k jobs as somehow being associated with Korean purchasing power, when in reality that’s nowhere near accurate. My criticism of your lazy, scanning blog post was that you said “Koreans love to eat fruit rather than processed dessert after meals…Washington State cherry growers have turned this habit into jobs and revenue.” You then proceeded to bolden data points that quoted jobs and revenue, very clearly linking the two. But in fact those data points were not representative of the Korean share of that market. Not even in the same galaxy.
So you either didn’t read the article, didn’t comprehend it, or you chose to bolden data points that you knew were misleading. None of those three options reflects well on you.
I know, because I read the article. Try it sometime, especially if you link it and base your post on it.
Who’s upset? I’m pointing out the bullshit you posted. The local paper didn’t jumble or misrepresent facts, you did. The local paper presented all the numbers and made it clear that the actual Korean market is $11 mil, not $750 mil. You cut and pasted unrelated facts to make an implication that is clearly false. You didn’t just quote the local paper. You mixed and match accurate information they wrote and turned it into a line of bullshit. The local paper doesn’t deserve criticism, you do.
Like I said, this kind of stuff is par for the course for the Korean media, and it’s embarrassing no matter who does it, you included.
Er, no. Pronounced “won”.
Reread the article and Anonymoose is right, I missed the paragraph immediately before the one that brought out $750M in total revenues for the industry.
My bad. Post will be changed.
Anonymoose, two things…
Thanks for pointing out the error, but your confrontational attitude towards me is counterproductive. And two, you seem to be a long time reader, but it appears that you’ve only started commenting recently (the last two days). Well in that case, welcome.
When I read the “wan” comment, the article lost 100% of my interest.
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