Life at Cherry Republic is more than just a bowl of cherries. It’s more like a progressive dinner with cherries every step of the way.
There is cherry salsa and cherry barbecue sauce, candy, turnovers, pies, cookies, ice cream, sorbet, biscotti and poundcake. Thirsty? Grab a soda. It’s 8 percent cherry juice.
Tart cherries, the signature fruit of northwestern Lower Michigan, are the main attraction at Cherry Republic, a retail, wholesale and mail-order business on a side street in this town about 20 miles northwest of Traverse City.
Cherry Republic, with its cherry products and lush gardens, is becoming a tourist destination for the hungry or just plain curious. As many as 400 visitors a summer day browse through the rustic Up North-style retail store, bakery and soda fountain, sampling from among the company’s 100-plus cherry products.
“Most people have not sampled any cherry product other than cherry pie, so we’ve got to educate the public on how good cherries taste,” says Bob Sutherland, the owner, president and goodwill ambassador of Cherry Republic.
This year, he says, his firm will use more than 500,000 pounds of Montmorency tart cherries–twice as many as in 1997–in products sold here and elsewhere, by mail and at fall gift shows from Detroit to Denver that Sutherland and his wife, Amy, visit.
“It might take 10 or 15 years, but we’d like to be the Ocean Spray of the cherry business,” says Sutherland, 37, who estimates his firm’s 1998 sales will reach $1.5 million.
In just a few years, Sutherland has tapped a nerve that connects the strong appeal of the region for vacationers and year-round residents with a local crop. He considers himself more of a marketer than a food person, but he says, “I like selling and I like creating new products. I find food people who can help me create new products.”
T-shirt start
Sutherland conceived Cherry Republic in 1989, while still a student majoring in English and speech at Northern Michigan University. That summer, the Glen Arbor native dreamed up the idea for a T-shirt promoting northern Michigan as the Cherry Republic. He sold the shirt from his car’s trunk to about 13 wholesalers.
Artist Kristin Hurlin designed the shirt, which has two raccoons on the front holding the Cherry Republic shield. On the shirt’s back, raccoons frolic in a cherry tree drawn above Cherry Republic’s motto: “Life, Liberty, Beaches & Pie.” (The shirt is still sold at the store, although the typeface has been modified to satisfy concerns over similarities to clothing retailer Banana Republic.)
Other T-shirts followed, and Sutherland says sales reached 25,000. But in 1993, he wanted a product that would sell year-round, especially after he made a canoe trip out West and saw the popularity of a locally made peanut butter-chocolate chip cookie in Montana.
He decided that “a cookie or two in a pack sold to the vacationers with a northern Michigan theme would be a nice way to diversify.”
Sutherland came up with the name Boomchunka, the packaging and labels, and got the Grand Traverse Bagel Co. to make two cookies for him. The Northern Boomchunka was similar to the cookie he had seen out West. The bagel company suggested a cherry Boomchunka with white chocolate, dried cherries and rolled oats. The cherry cookie was a hit; the other eventually was dropped. Since then, Sutherland has tweaked the recipe and the Cherry Boomchunka now is made at Cherry Republic.
A few months after he started selling the cookies, delivering them himself once a week across northern Michigan, a farmer approached Sutherland. He had developed his own way to dry cherries and wondered if Sutherland would market them. Sutherland agreed as long as he could use his own label. From there, the Cherry Republic product line took off.
Cherry Republic opened its main store on South Lake Street in 1995. To add needed space, the Sutherlands bought and remodeled two adjacent buildings to create 4,000 square feet, including 1,200 square feet of retail space and a shipping department for mail orders that opened this year. About 15,000 copies of the catalog, which is in its third year, went out last year. (For a free catalog, call 800-206-6949, 8 a.m.-10 p.m. Eastern time.)
The company has shipped products all over the United States and to 15 foreign countries, aided by its Web site — www.cherryrepublic.com
Demand grew so fast that some Cherry Republic products, including candies and jar goods, now are made elsewhere. But all of the baked goods and ice cream are made on site.
Raw materials
Cherry Republic has benefited from the Sutherlands’ hard work, marketing savvy and location in a town that is a magnet for tourists who like to explore on foot, says Joe Lothamer, manager of retail and new product promotions for the Cherry Marketing Institute, a national research and promotion group in Lansing that is funded by tart cherry growers.
“But you could have all this hard work and marketing and if you don’t have products that taste good, it’s not going to go anywhere. And he has products that taste good,” Lothamer says.
Among the newer ones are a cherry salsa, developed by a former employee, and a barbecue sauce made and bottled under contract by a friend of the Sutherlands. The tart cherries are dried for Cherry Republic by Smeltzer Orchard Co. in Frankfort.
Amy Sutherland, 34, who grew up in the Detroit suburbs, helps out where needed, from baking cookies to shipping, but her pride is the large garden at Cherry Republic, where hollyhocks, mullein, yarrow, roses, cosmos, sunflowers and Russian sage erupt in a changing tableau.
“Some people come every day to see the garden,” she says.
With 20 employees–the number increases to 35 during the holidays–Bob Sutherland is able to focus on his favorite part of the business: selling the product.
“I love to host,” he says. “I love to talk cherries. I get to meet people and talk cherries and make friends.”
In some ways–the samples to try, the store’s interior, Hurlin’s artwork–Cherry Republic visitors may be reminded of the retail shops of American Spoon Foods, the highly successful Petoskey-based food company. That does not surprise Justin Rashid, American Spoon Foods’ founder and president.
“We demonstrated with our company that there was a lot of untapped potential for presenting Michigan fruit products in a new light as specialty foods,” he says. “It would be naive of us to expect that others wouldn’t take off with a good idea.”
Cherry Republic is, according to Sutherland, the leading retailer and manufacturer of exclusively cherry products. (Other cherry experts consulted could not name anyone bigger.) And the company goes about it with a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek approach, like the “Life, Liberty, Beaches & Pie” slogan. He enjoys talking about the “country” of the Cherry Republic and, in the current catalog, ponders why the Cherry Republic was not represented at the Winter Olympics.
They’re good for you
That young-at-heart attitude may be prophetic. According to ongoing research at Michigan State University, tart cherries contain antioxidants, which may have something to do with slowing the aging process. They also have anti-inflammatory compounds. The MSU research, funded in part by the Cherry Marketing Institute, also is looking at whether tart cherries slow the growth of colon cancer tumors.
Health-related results such as those would be good news for tart cherry growers. Michigan is the nation’s leading producer of tart (sometimes called pie or sour) cherries, supplying 70 percent to 75 percent of the U.S. crop each year, and this summer’s yield was one of the largest ever.
About 40 percent of the state’s 36,000 acres of cherry trees are in the Grand Traverse region, which is sometimes called “the cherry capital of the world.”
Or maybe the Cherry Republic?
With his food products and approach, Bob Sutherland is working on it.
“People are going to come in and they’re going to sample and they’re going to taste and buy something,” he says. “My goal is to tickle them with the way the business is set up and who we are.”
