B.J. and I met with Craig at his office. He was happy that B.J. had joined on the visit.  Craig told us that they had recently opened their 91st store and they’ve also recently had four remodels. We talked about the upcoming crop and the timing that he should expect out of the northwest. We mentioned that we felt that he could comfortably start promoting sometime around 6/19.

We also discussed his reluctance to run print ads for cherries. He loves to promote cherries and does an excellent job of displaying them at retail. His concern with print advertising is that often competition will do a low price loss leader and he will advertise at a reasonable price and get beat on that price. He wants to try to avoid that at all cost . We talked about how he could enhance his promotions in other ways. We discussed perhaps inserting a banner ad on their website so customers could click directly to purchase cherries. He has referred us to their marketing manager, Tom Trainor, and we will work at  possibly putting together a banner promotion.