There is something wonderfully nostalgic about opening a box of cherries at Christmas or bringing them out to share with friends at a barbecue. Cherries have become part of the rhythm of a New Zealand home. For a few precious weeks each year, they signal that summer has truly arrived.
Many of those cherries begin their journey in Cromwell, the fruit bowl of the South, where Pure Otago Direct connects New Zealand families with cherries picked fresh from local orchards. Behind every box is a collective of family-owned growers who joined forces in 2017 to share the fruit, the region, and the people behind it.
Central Otago’s hot summer days, cool nights, and free-draining soils create ideal growing conditions for cherries. It is a landscape of extremes, where winter frosts give way to long summer days and growers spend months nurturing a crop that will ultimately be harvested over a matter of weeks.
Every spring, thousands of honeybees move through the orchards, cross-pollinating the pretty white blossoms that will eventually become cherries. Growers spend months pruning, irrigating, nourishing, and protecting the crop while keeping a close eye on the weather.
Rain can cause fruit to split, wind can leave its mark, and weather conditions right up until harvest influence the crop. Growing cherries requires patience, resilience, and no small amount of optimism. Growers are optimists by nature.
Eleven different cherry varieties ripen in succession from early December through to late January, extending the harvest season, with the distinctive Rainier standing apart from the more familiar red cherries.
When harvest arrives, a remarkable seasonal workforce springs into action. Around 200 pickers harvest cherries by hand across 16 orchards, while another 50 people work in our Cromwell packhouse. There, AI grading technology upgraded in 2025 assesses size, colour, and visible defects before the fruit is packed and dispatched around New Zealand.
The Pure Otago Direct online store was born from a simple idea: let New Zealanders buy directly from the growers themselves. Today, customers can order cherries online and have them delivered to their doorstep, often within a day of being picked. A little over a day ago the fruit was hanging on a tree in Central Otago, and today it could be arriving at a home anywhere between Kaitaia and Bluff.
Customers can even choose specific cherry sizes when ordering online, a level of transparency rarely seen in fresh produce retail. Cherries are measured by diameter in millimetres, with the impressively large 30mm and 32mm fruit among the most sought-after of the season.
As this summer’s harvest gets underway, there is the usual mixture of excitement and uncertainty. No one knows exactly what the season will bring. Perhaps that’s part of the magic.
For a few weeks each summer, the orchards are a hive of activity, the packhouse is humming and thousands of boxes of beautiful fresh cherries begin their journey to homes around New Zealand, delivering the unmistakable taste of a Central Otago summer.
To order or find out more visit pureotagocherries.co.nz
