Chukar Cherry Owners Receive Award For Growing Their Small Business Into A Success

PROSSER, Benton County - Officially, the season for fresh cherries usually lasts only about a month, from mid-June to mid-July.

But a pair of former Seattleites have found a way to stretch that season throughout the year - and they have won awards for doing so.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Guy and Pamela Auld the Small Business Team of the Year for the state.

In an unpretentious metal building near a tire store on the outskirts of this town in the lower Yakima Valley, the Aulds make dried fruits - mostly cherries - that brought in $1.5 million in sales last year to their Chukar Cherry Co.

The sales came from their own three stores - including one in the Pike Place Market - specialty stores and some New York City delicatessens, and a small but growing mail-order business.

In a development that could hardly have been anticipated when the company was started in the mid-'80s, Chukar Cherries products also are mentioned by name in some cookbooks for owners of bread machines.

"This shows what a successful small business can do," said Art Oquist, a spokesman for the Small Business Administration in Spokane, noting that Chukar Cherries' start-up "from nothing" nine years ago "is really tough to do, especially in an agricultural business."

The Aulds also were honored for finding a creative way to add economic value to what had been just a straight commodity, creating jobs in the process.

"They have really found a niche and have generated a lot of demand in a part of the market that had not been filled before," said Sheryl Pace, marketing director of the Washington State Fruit Commission in Yakima.

"They have had fabulous success, and they have reached a point that most entrepreneurs only dream of," said Ben Bennett, director of the Port of Benton, who nominated them for the SBA award.

When it started in 1985, Chukar Cherries was merely a farmhouse experiment, a cottage industry inspired by a practice Pamela Auld had noticed a few Prosser-area residents doing: They dehydrated fresh cherries and kept them for use all year long.

Two years earlier, the couple had left Seattle and bought a 100-acre cherry orchard, one of the state's largest, where they harvested fresh cherries and sold them wholesale.

With annual crops that peaked a few years ago at 2 million pounds and wholesale prices varying from 60 cents to $1 a pound, the orchard was a lucrative business. But it was also a labor-intensive one. Just picking the cherries often requires 2,000 employees in a season, and the Aulds once had 600 working at one time. The cherry crop is also extremely variable from year to year. The state's total crop ranges from $60 million to $80 million in value a year, Pace said.

"Rains can wipe out a whole crop almost overnight," she said.

The Aulds wanted something to stabilize their income, and the answer came unexpectedly.

"We noticed that local people would come and buy cherries to dry them," Pamela Auld said. She never thought much about it until a

customer asked her to watch his dehydrator while he was on vacation. "In return, he gave me some dried cherries," she said.

She liked them so much she gave some to her husband's niece who lived in New York City - and the niece discovered a market for them in some New York delis.

The Aulds had a dehydrator made for them, and installed it in a metal building on their property. They produced 1,000 pounds of dried cherries, which they packaged in their basement.

First-year sales were about $3,000, mostly to the Made in Washington retail chain.

Now the business has grown to 21 full-time employees and more on a seasonal basis. The couple operates the cherry company and the orchard as separate businesses. Chukar Cherries now buys about 10 percent of what the orchard produces.

Last year, the Aulds sold 250,000 pounds of dried cherries, blueberries, cranberries and some spinoff food products such as cherry preserves, cherry herb tea, cherry poultry sauce and cherry scone mix.

Chocolate-covered cherries and berries account for about half of all sales, and varieties are combined in several versions of Chukar Cherries trail mixes.

IT'S IN THE NAME

Pamela Auld is often asked the meaning of Chukar in the company name. "In China, Chukar sounds like the word for cherry, so the Chinese people think our company is named Cherry Cherries," she said.

But a chukar is not a variety of cherry. It is a type of partridge found in the Yakima Valley and many other areas.

After they moved to Prosser, the Aulds learned it is the home of the annual "National Chukar Trials," a sporting event held every March in the nearby Horse Heaven Hills wheat country. In the trials, specially trained dogs sniff out the normally ground-dwelling birds, which take flight. The object is not to capture or hurt the birds, just to show off the training of the dogs and get the birds into the air.

SELLING ITS PRODUCT

In addition to its roadside shop here and its stall in the main arcade at Pike Place Market, Chukar Cherries also runs the only gift shop at the Pasco airport.

The company's business plan is focused on opening more retail stores, perhaps two in the next two years.

Their mail-order business, which has grown without the benefit of marketing but with the benefit of a toll-free line (1-800-624-9544), brought in 9 percent of the company's sales last year.

"That's your invisible store," ultimately more important and more cost-effective than retail locations, Pamela Auld said.

The Aulds won't discuss their profits except to say that, like most growing enterprises, Chukar Cherries has had an enormous appetite for reinvestment of profits. Despite last year's sales of $1.5 million, "We are not making a lot of money," Pamela Auld said.

On the surface, selling dried cherries looks pretty profitable. A 10-ounce gift bag of chocolate-coated cherries or berries retails for $9, and the company's trail mixes (mostly dried fruit) sell in four-ounce bags for $4.50. That's $19 a pound, compared with 75 cents to $1.25 a pound for fresh cherries sold in supermarkets.

However, it takes six to eight pounds of fresh cherries to make one pound of dried.

"All the customer sees is the condensed fruit, the little bag," Pamela Auld said.

"And it's a misconception that you can dry poor-quality fruit," she said. "You can, but you still have all the expenses, and you don't have a quality product. All the research shows that to succeed, you have to have that quality."

Soon after the company started, the Aulds had to make a major business decision, she said. "We had to decide, would we just sell dried bing cherries, or would we have a line of products. We decided to have a line, and that is one of our advantages now."

The couple didn't have to work very hard to get product ideas. "All our products are developed from customer feedback," she said. "People are always telling us what we should do better and what they want that you don't have. All you have to do is listen."

So far, Chukar Cherries has little direct competition. Pamela Auld said the company's largest competitor is Oregon's Harry and David - which is also one of Chukar Cherries' larger customers.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

Chukar Cherries was built with a certain entrepreneurial spirit.

"We are very typical of entrepreneurs," Pamela Auld said. "We are comfortable with risk and have some good skills, though we are missing a lot of them."

Before they moved to Prosser in 1983, Guy Auld was a program director at the Downtown Seattle YMCA and Pamela Auld sold real estate for Windermere.

"We knew we were entrepreneurial in nature," Pamela Auld said, after the couple owned a laundromat and dry-cleaning establishment on Capitol Hill, then sold it after a year and a half.

Guy Auld, who grew up in South Dakota, wanted to raise his three children in a rural area.

Pamela went along with the idea, and they have found Prosser to their liking. A road sign at the edge of town describes this Benton County seat as "a pleasant place with pleasant people," and the Aulds say by and large that is accurate. Guy Auld said he thinks the sign itself has helped to make it so.

The couple still has strong ties in Seattle but find it a less efficient place.

"When we go to Seattle, we leave at 4 or 5 in the morning, and we're on the bridge (across Lake Washington on the way home) by 3 p.m. We go to our store in the Market, and we figure we can get three things done in a day."