The Perfect Pear Pipeline

One hand picks the pear from the tree. Another efficiently and gently packs it into a padded box, and yet another loads those boxes onto a truck. A hand unloads the pear at the grocery store, arranging it into a neat green row. And finally, you hold the pear in your own hand to gauge its ripeness before setting it in your basket.

It’s easy to forget how many people carefully handle the food we eat, making sure a delicate, easily bruised pear is never damaged as it travels from the farm to the processing plant and all the way to the store, but it’s a great reminder of how interconnected we are (and, also, how it never hurts to wash your produce).

“It’s amazing, really, to think of all the labor and everything that goes into it, both in the orchard and in the packaging house,” said Shawn Cox, the general manager of Peshastin Hi-Up Growers, a family-owned business that grows, packages, and delivers 10 varieties of pears, including Golden Russet Bosc, Red Anjou, and Green Anjou.

“Pears often get overlooked,” said Cox. “It’s been a staple in households for a long time.”

The Washington Grown team visited Peshastin Hi-Up Growers in Season 11, on the first day the Anjou pears were being processed. The pears arrived at the packing shed after being handpicked in the fields. At the facility, they were sorted, weighed, and adorned with those little stickers we all recognize from the store.

“It’s what we call a PLU, but it’s a sticker on the pear that tells what size the pear is, and it’s scannable at the supermarkets,” said Cox.

When asked, Cox affirmed that the stickers are, in fact, food-safe, “but I wouldn’t eat them.”

The pears are separated by size and hand-packaged carefully by employees who place them in trays with pear-shaped divots, laying the trays between layers of padding in cardboard boxes. These pears will be sold in grocery stores around the country.

In another section of the facility, employees wrap each pear gently and quickly in paper and place them into cardboard boxes; these pears will be exported internationally. Cox pointed at a box of Anjou pears being loaded into a 30-degree storage warehouse, which will keep them fresh until spring.

“We’re basically putting those pears to sleep, and then we’ll be bringing them out and selling them all year round,” said Cox. “We can keep it in storage if we wrap it, and it tastes really good all year.”

Cox said Anjou pears store really well for a long amount of time, whereas Bartlett pears are only available from August through February.

After being carefully packaged, crates of fruit are loaded onto trucks, where they will be delivered across the continent. The pears heading overseas to places like Vietnam or the Middle East are packed into a large shipping container, driven west, and loaded on a cargo ship leaving from the Port of Seattle.

Washington is the country’s top producer of fresh pears, and in 2023, farmers in the state grew 267,000 tons of the fruit, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But despite the fact that they’ve been grown in the U.S. since the late 1700s, Cox said he’s noticed a rise in interest recently, with younger generations being excited about pears again.

He emphasized that there’s a pear for every taste bud.

“I think that there’s enough pear varieties out there from the beginning to the end that you can find a pear that you like,” he said. “There’s a lot of different tastes and flavors and textures — so try a pear!”