Thousands of pounds of Flathead cherries, packed in bright green and red boxes bearing information about Montana, are arriving now in retail outlets throughout Asia and Europe.

The cherries hit the overseas market three days after the produce is picked from orchards near Flathead Lake.

The cherries are processed at Glacier Fresh Orchards and Packing at Yellow Bay, prepared for shipping and usually sent out the same day they’re picked.

Owner Cody Herring processes and packs for 10 local cherry growers, in addition to cherries harvested from the 13,000 trees in his orchard.

This year marks the seventh season of packing at Glacier Fresh, Herring said. He has operated the orchard since 2001.

As Herring worked his orchard, he began making contacts with other cherry growers in the region and learned about a solid, growing export business in Canada. He met a broker who had wholesale and retail connections overseas and “decided to make the jump” into processing and distributing.

“We built the plant purely on an export ideal,” Herring said.

He now works through a brokerage agreement with 11 Canadian cherry growers who also are packers and shippers. Because of different climates where their 12 businesses operate, the group typically sells cherries from June through September each year.

Because Glacier Fresh is an export business, Herring doesn’t operate a roadside stand and fruit processed at his facility isn’t sold at area grocery stores. Herring operates as an independent business and isn’t a member of the Flathead Lake Cherry Growers cooperative.

He has developed a niche market and is proud to be promoting the top-grade fruit grown around Flathead Lake.

Herring harvests between 300,000 and 400,000 pounds of cherries from his 35-acre orchard each year. He grows lapins, Rainiers, Kootenays and skeenas.

Herring employs about 50 pickers every year and another 70 people work in his processing plant each season. The processing facility operates for about three weeks. This year, it opened Aug. 1 and Herring expects to wrap up processing around Aug. 20.

As growers bring fruit in, it’s kept in a cold room for a brief period until it hits the processing line.

That’s when things really get rolling.

Tubs of cherries, designed to hold 20 pounds of fruit, are weighed on a digital scale that tracks the weight of the full shipment each grower brings in.

After being weighed, cherries are dumped into a bin of cold water, kept at “river temperature,” about 50 degrees, Herring said. As the cherries begin their ascent up a moving rack, doused in water the entire time, two workers skim leaves from the water and begin spotting and removing any fruit that’s less than perfect.

The gentle water process separates the stems from the cherries as the fruit swirls in what Herring describes as “sort of like a big, slow toilet bowl.”

Cherries next move through water-filled tubes into four troughs, each manned by eight people. The fruit rolls across a moving belt, pushed along by moving water, as workers push any cherry that’s not ideal into a gutter.

The top-notch cherries continue through a water-driven channel into the final phase of the cooling process. A machine with another conveyor belt moves fruit through 32-degree water in a process that takes about five minutes. Fruit is sorted by size on that machine, Herring said.

As cherries exit the water, they are packed into boxes, stacked and toted into another cold room where they’ll be put on pallets and loaded into refrigerated semitrailers.

Trucks haul the fruit to either Calgary or Vancouver, where Herring and his partners have access to cold storage facilities.  From there the cherries are driven on refrigerated trucks to the airport and loaded onto airplanes to their final destinations of Europe and Asia, Herring said.

Typically, fruit is available to consumers two or three days after it’s picked, Herring said. “Our drive time to Canada is short and our flights are short,” he said.

Speed is vital with fresh, fragile fruit such as cherries. And speed is key in the Glacier Fresh plant. A cherry moves through the system in about eight minutes.

In 40 minutes on Wednesday, Herring’s crew processed about 15,000 pounds of lambert cherries delivered by grower Mike Tiensvold.

Herring can process up to 50,000 pounds of cherries on a big day, but an average day sees around 30,000 pounds zip through the process.

After about a five-minute changeover, the workers began processing a shipment of lapin cherries from grower Bill Collins.

The flawed cherries shoot out of the sorting trays into giant bins and eventually are taken back to the orchard and used for mulch, Herring said.

Reporter Shelley Ridenour may be reached at 758-4439 or sridenour@dailyinterlake.com.