Chukar's Organic Rainier Cherries Win 2023 Good Food Award
Big news! Our Organic Rainier Cherries have been announced as 2023 Good Food Award Winner!
Each year, Good Food Foundation judges evaluate over 2000 entries via blind tasting. Fifteen winners are chosen in each specialty food category—showcasing the best sustainably produced foods available in the USA. Organically grown by Inland Northwest farmers and dried on-site in Prosser—Chukar’s Organic Rainiers excel on both accounts.
Dried Organic Rainier Cherries have been a top seller since Chukar launched their Certified Organic product line in 2013. Located in the heart of Washington cherry country—Chukar sources their cherries locally and dries them without added sugar, preservatives, or sulfites using a natural process the company pioneered in the 1980s on the family cherry orchard.
Read founder Pam Montgomery's remarks at the Awards Ceremony and see our full press release for more info.
Friday evening April 22, 2023
Good Food Awards - Remarks from Pam Montgomery, founder of Chukar Cherries
Hello! I am happy to be in your company tonight, celebrating GOOD FOOD and the people that make it happen. High-quality food is desired and recognized world-wide, but launching any food business based on QUALITY is a defiant act requiring VISION, TENACITY, a GREAT TEAM, and DEVOTED CUSTOMERS.
In 1982 our young family moved from Seattle to an 8,000-tree cherry orchard in Washington’s Yakima Valley. Once harvest ended, countless cherries remained unpicked. After the leftover cherries fully tree ripened, I rediscovered something our ancestors knew: when left on the branch, the fruit’s innate sugar will steadily increase and function as a natural preservative.
But would the cherries spoil? This was pre-internet, so I called UC Davis, the research hub for the raisin-prune industry. I was told it was impossible to produce shelf-stable dried sweet cherries without adding additional sugar and preservatives. Nevertheless, my squirreled away dried cherries tasted delicious year after year. Were they a new wholesome food? A secondary market for growers? What other cherry goodies could we craft?
My mind was set on QUALITY, crafting locally sourced fruit specialties free of anything artificial. It became clear that to control quality, we would need to become a vertically integrated food manufacturer. But how? I didn’t know anything about food manufacturing and industrial dehydrators were huge and expensive. Then I found an ingenious mechanical tinkerer, a lone inventor in Oregon had just developed a circulating air fruit dehydrator, one that was the right size, the right price, and worked great—and together we created drying curves for sweet cherries.
The VISION was to craft all natural, regionally sourced Northwest cherry specialties, freshly made using just-in-time manufacturing, sustainably packaged, and bursting with Pacific Northwest verve. The latter was achieved by artist Jim Hays, renowned Washington illustrator and creator of our Chukar® bird and fruit/nut illustrations.
Over the past 35 years Chukar Cherries has cultivated many good things: innovative QUALITY foods (Dried Organic Rainiers and Bings), a secondary market for cherry growers, a vertically integrated food company providing great jobs in our rural community and Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and importantly, devoted customers.
Finally, all these good things are due to a tenacious TEAM of individuals, some contributing 15 to 25 years to building Chukar; notably CFO JT Montgomery, Operations Director Kathleen Young, and in the audience: Sales Director Teresa Garcia and General Manager Tim Oten.
By recognizing Chukar’s Organic Rainier cherries, The Good Food Awards Foundation honors our team who, like all of you, place quality and innovation at the forefront. Thank you!
Watch Pam's full remarks in the video below!
