Cherry season is underway, and while it's shaping up to be one of the lightest seasons on record, quality has never been better.
One of the reasons for that is in recent years, cherry growers have started using new, fascinating machines that make sure the best cherries are sorted out.
"This technology here revolutionized the cherry industry," Nick Lucich, who works at Delta Packing in Lodi, which grows and packages cherries for major retailers across the country, explained.
The machine -- known as a compact sorter -- functions as a sort-of x-ray camera that sorts every single cherry into categories such as size, shape and color. Thirty-thousand cherries a minute go through the machine, and as each one does it gets photographed roughly 40 different times.
The photographs identify cracks, defects, bruising, softness and firmness in a single cherry. Nearly instantaneously, the machine then moves that cherry into a specific bucket based on those qualities. For instance, Large, mahogany cherries go through one lane; small cherries go through another. The defective cherries either get thrown out or sold for the purposes of making jams or maraschino cherries.
The machines -- which cost roughly $5 million -- have only been around for a few years and are only used during the eight weeks of cherry season.
"Very expensive for the amount of time we run them," Luchich said.
But, he added, it's worth it, because, "all that's coming out is good cherries."
Joe Cataldo, a third-generation cherry grower at J&M Farms, says there are pros and cons to the new technology.
"It's helped us provide an almost perfect box for the consumer," he said. "It's kind of hurt us because now the expectations are so high it's tough to meet them."
Watch the video above to see how the machine is used at a Lodi packaging shed.
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