Where Do Cherries Come from?

Where do cherries come from? It may surprise you to learn that sweet cherries originate in Asia Minor, between the Black and Caspian seas. They were only brought to Europe by passing birds dropping seeds from across the sea.

Once they started growing, Ancient Greeks and the Romans were the first societies to consciously cultivate and increase cherry production.

There wasn’t a known cherry crop in the United States until after 1629 when Spanish missionaries introduced the fruit to California. By the 1800s, sweet cherries were established across the West Coast in Washington, Oregon, and California.

To this day, these are still the main pioneers of sweet cherry production in the United States.

Current Production

In a global view, the largest producer of cherries is Turkey, a country that harvests nearly 500 thousand tons of these drupes in a year. The United States is a close second, but countries like Spain and Chile are on the rise when it comes to cherry production.

Where do cherries come from now? That question has a lot of answers. They come from the grocery store or farmer’s market. They come from trees, ripening in the early summer. More than that, cherries come from history -- both the history of the United States and that of the world as a whole over the course of thousands of years.