Sweeter future for sour cherries
Chocolate bar success prompts CollinMcMeeken to replant his fallow orchard land. By Judie Steeves
I
f you’re a chocaholic who focuses on buying local and supporting your neighbours, then you’ll be pleased that a Kelowna orchardist has diversified and now makes a delectable chocolate bar with sour cherries and almonds in it. Collin McMeeken is one of only about three commercial sour cherry growers left in the province, but he’s not only still growing the tart fruits on eight acres, he has plans to replant his entire 40 acres to a combination of sweet and sour cherries. It’s an orchard his father purchased during the 1950s at the base of Black Knight Mountain and that McMeeken now intends to rejuvenate. When the price of sour cherries tanked in the early 1990s, going from 50 cents a pound to five cents a pound, he says, “I had a kid in diapers and we had to make a decision about whether to buy the diapers or replant the orchard.”
JUDIE STEEVES
That’s when he embarked on a career as an investment adviser, ripped out the cherry trees and left most of the land fallow until recently. The harvest from his remaining eight acres of Montmorency sour cherries has been sold south of the border in recent years for processing into juice concentrate, puree and fruit smoothies and for making dried fruit.
Kelowna orchardist (and investment adviser) Collin McMeeken with one of his giant sour cherry and almond-filled chocolate bars.
and almonds.
With no crop of the sour cherries to be dried and covered in chocolate for Starbucks' customers, the supplier looked further afield and begged for the McMeeken fruit.
But now he intends to replant at least part of the acreage to a Hungarian tart cherry called Balaton, named after a lake in that country, near where it’s grown. “They’re crunchier and hold their shape better when they’re cooked,” he notes. They’re also known for having a particularly good flavour.
McMeeken is a strong proponent of machine harvesting and he plans to replant to a denser orchard design that will be compatible with mechanical picking. It was after a devastating frost that affected orchards south of the border in 2000 that McMeeken took his first step toward production of chocolate bars full of cherries
He ended up with a few of those dried cherries and thought how nice they would be in a chocolate bar with a few almonds.
He carted the dried fruits off to Vancouver where he had a cherry-almond bark made up for him on big cookie sheets.
“It seemed like a shame to break it up, so we wrapped the whole sheet of chocolate instead, like a big chocolate bar,”he explains.
“I used them as a holiday gift for clients,” he adds. However, the company wanted him to order at least 50 or they wouldn’t make them, and he only needed 40, so he sold 10 to fellow Kelowna orchardist Bob Fugger. Those gifts were such a hit, he wanted 10 more, so the
British Columbia FRUIT GROWER • Summer 2015 17
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