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Field Report



Cherry windfall



By Larry Arway



Cherry Republic has a rather distinctive claim to make: The company, located 160 miles north of Grand Rapids, MI, USA, in the town of Glen Arbor, population 800, is the world’s largest exclusive retailer of cherry products. In 1989, when Bob Sutherland was in college, he designed a whimsical cherry tree logo T-shirt that he sold out of his van. Since then he has spent the past 17 years developing one of northern Michigan’s fastest growing businesses.
After selling 3,500 T-shirts that first year, Sutherland felt that this would make a great career, so he expanded the line of shirts. For those who have not had the opportunity to visit northern Michigan, it would help to understand that it’s not a great place to sell T-shirts in the cold months. So Sutherland decided to expand his line to include a cookie made with rolled oats, white chocolate and dried cherries, which he called Boomchunka!

Products have been added through the years to bring the total offerings now to about 180 items, everything from baked goods to chocolate covered cherries. There’s even chocolate covered cherry pits, used for the pit spitting contest when fresh cherries aren’t available. And, of course, the original T-shirt.

Roni Hazelton, in charge of corporate sales and purchasing for Cherry Republic, has been with the company for eight years and has seen major changes in that time. “We produce a wonderful cherry wine,” she says, “and last year we added to our lineup of barbeque cherry sauces.”

All of the company’s labels are custom designed, she says, “including hand-drawn artwork for the new line of barbeque sauces.”

“While we apply many of the labels by hand,” Hazelton adds, “We do machine-apply virtually all of our bottled products right on the production line, and some of these have the showy graphic label on the front with a separate ingredients label on the back.
“Nearly all of our labels are laminated because we ship a lot of chocolate items,” says Hazelton, “and we have to ship the entire order in a cold pack box so we can guarantee safe arrival in the summer months. The laminate protects all of the labels in the box from the buildup of condensation during shipping and helps protect the label after the products are refrigerated.”

Cherry Republic regularly sends orders to all 50 states and many foreign countries. The company donates 1 percent of its total sales to agricultural and environmental programs designed to preserve historic orchard lands in the northern Michigan region, and helped launch the local PlusONE program in the area as well, which asks customers to donate 1 percent of their sales to the program.

The Cherry Republic complex includes a Great Hall, which is the primary building housing the various retail products and also includes product tasting. The company gives away some $50,000 in tasting samples at the Great Hall and at various road show sites during the year. There is also a Cherry Republic bakery and cafe, which features fresh baked cherry pies, several varieties of the Boomchunka cookies and even a fresh cherry bread, which you can buy in loaf form or order a fresh made sandwich.

Another building on the property houses the winery, and includes tastings of cherry pop, cherry soda and cherry ginger ale for the young and old alike. The winery currently features a 100 percent cherry wine, a sparkling cherry wine and several blends, including white and red wines with cherry.

Asked about their best selling product, Hazelton didn’t hesitate: “Our dried cherries, which are great for eating, baking and cooking,” she says. While fruit has been dried for centuries, Cherry Republic uses a new patented process to extract the water, concentrate the natural sugars in the cherries and end up with a “dried” cherry that is soft and supple.

With dozens and dozens of different labels, how does Hazelton achieve any buying economy? “We group like-sized and shaped labels when we order,” she says, “but we still have something like 40 to 50 different sizes, and we’re adding new products all the time. We order year round, depending on our needs.” The company uses one primary label vendor, but Hazelton says they have several back up sources, including nearby vendors.

Labels in the snow


The cold weather in Minnesota, located in the northern United States, is legendary. A love of ice hockey is nearly a requirement for residency. In the town of Roseau, up by the border with Manitoba, Canada, the local high school hockey team just won its seventh state championship against much larger schools. Roseau also has the distinction of being the place where Polaris Industries manufactures all of its snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs).
Polaris Industries knows the value of labels. The company utilizes about 5 million labels on its products each year at the Roseau plant.

“The labeling process is extremely important to Polaris products,” says Blair Johnson, engineering project leader at the Roseau facility. “Our decals create a fresh and exciting skin that promotes our brand and ‘the way out’ experience.  We want the highest quality product on the market, so each label has to perform to predetermined  durability standards. We have developed internal testing procedures to ensure that our labels meet all the environmental conditions these vehicles encounter — snow, ice, mud, rain, and so on.”

As for the material selection for the varied conditions their vehicles encounter, Johnson says that “There are a number of factors that need to considered, such as substrates, temperature and UV exposure, tamper resistance, etc., that we would use to determine criteria for material specification and adhesion.

“We also work closely with our contract partner, Sunwest Screen Graphics of Winnipeg, Manitoba, located about two and a half hours north of us”, Johnson says. “They are a great supplier that assists us with every aspect of development, from design to end use: labels for instructions, to denote warning or caution, bar coded labels for critical systems, as well as the decorative labels and emission decals. All contribute to the ride experience. If you’re out on a trail in the woods, an instructional label just might be your ticket to a quick and safe trip home.”

Johnson says that Polaris Industries manufactures more than 30 different snowmobile models in Roseau, and each snowmobile averages between 20 and 25 decals or labels. There is also a major lineup of ATVs manufactured at Roseau, contributing another 23 models to the total.


 A Polaris ATV
Because the models built for export to Europe and Canada are also manufactured at Roseau, they have to carry the European and Canadian certification labels. “All of our products also have what we call intellectual property labels, which include a listing of patents applicable to that particular line,” says Johnson. “While actual production figures can vary year to year,” Blair says, “Polaris designs hundreds of new labels every year for all our products, which translates to millions of labels yearly in production.”

All of the labels for the ATV and snowmobile families of vehicles use five-year specification UV inks, which can hold up to the harshest conditions. The vehicles themselves certainly stand up: Three new ATV models introduced in 2006 — the Hawkeye, the Outlaw and the Sportsman X2 — won first place industry awards for the year.

Polaris Industries, which had sales in 2006 of about $1.7 billion, also manufactures the Ranger line of utility terrain vehicles, one of which finished first in its class at the March 2007 Baja race. These vehicles are made in Spirit Lake, IA, USA, along with Victory motorcycles.

Larry Arway recently retired from Standard Register, where he worked for 35 years in a variety of positions, among them sales promotion manager, product manager, label marketing manager, and technical consultant. Over the years he was involved in the design and development of new products, and has worked closely with many of the major consumer and industrial products companies in North America. A resident of Dayton, OH, USA, Arway can be reached by e-mail at bellafish1@sbcglobal.net.