Promoting Canadian-Grown Cherries

Canadian Food Focus had the opportunity to feature one of our country’s sweetest gems this summer: BC cherries!

Canadian Cherry Month

After several challenging years for sweet cherry producers, including extreme heat, pre-harvest rainstorms and early frosts, 2025 shaped up to be a strong season. As well, a surge of ‘buy Canadian’ pride helped boost consumers’ interest in finding locally-grown cherries. The BC Cherry Association celebrated with Canadian Cherry Month from July 15 to August 15.

Canadian Food Focus was able to amplify the Cherry Month campaign while providing valuable content to consumers throughout the year for this Canadian-grown treasure. We worked with the BC Cherry Association to prepare a webinar held on August 12. The event featured demonstrations from Andrea Holwegner, one of Canada’s leading dietitians and Erin Carlson, a cherry farmer from BC’s Okanagan Valley.

Erin Carlson joined the webinar live from the cherry orchard, allowing participants to view the trees and equipment and see harvesters picking the cherries that were destined for store shelves later that week. Then Andrea Holwegner brought viewers into her kitchen, where she discussed the health benefits of cherries and provided several interesting suggestions for enjoying this delicious fruit. Andrea’s ideas included a cherry cocktail, a fresh salsa, as a salad topper, in yogurt popsicles, and a clafoutis dessert, among others. The webinar is available for viewing here.

Articles, videos and recipes

In addition to the webinar, Canadian Food Focus worked with Andrea Holwegner and BC Cherry Association to develop an informative article, Cherry Very Good with facts about cherry production, nutrition information, buying and storing tips and recipe ideas. We also created a reel video, Looking for Canadian-grown cherries? that was shared through our social networks.

As part of our partnership with BC Cherries, we collaborated on five new recipes for the Canadian Food Focus online database, including delectable choices like Roasted Cherries Cream Cheese Dip, Cherry Pie Crumb Bars and Brandied Cherry Jam. Browse our collection here.

All of this content was added to existing content already developed on Canadian Food Focus, like Protecting Canadian Cherry Crops With Helicopters, Looking For Canadian-Grown Cherries? and Why Do Farmers Spray Sweet Cherries? This content forms the basis for Canadian Food Focus’ editorial calendar of articles, videos, social posts and learning tools that are shared with 40,000 followers through several social platforms, along with the community of dietitians, chefs, educators and others that are part of CFF’s influencer development work.

Answering consumers’ questions about Canadian food

“People love cherries are very proud of this truly Canadian ingredient,” said Dorothy Long, Managing Director of Canadian Food Focus. “You could really see how curious people were during our webinar.”

“The beauty of our model at Canadian Food Focus is that it allows us to present several different aspects of a food—how it is grown, nutritional benefits, cooking tips, farming practices—within an overall a body of content about all kinds of Canadian-grown ingredients. This is valuable, actionable information that consumers are looking for and keep coming back to.”