Reid Fruits

These are the best cherries you will ever eat.

Like the cherries

Great!! From Thailand

Working at Reid Fruit, it was our first cherry picking experience and the truth is that we feel very comfortable. I was surprised by the sizes of the cherries, nothing to see what one commonly sees in supermarkets. We thank all the team, especially Maria and Rolf our supervisors, they are the most! Thanks to Nick for the opportunity and Andrew for the advice: D We are going to bring back nice memories of here.

Trabajar en Reid Fruit, fue nuestra primera experiencia juntando cerezas y la verdad que nos sentimos muy cómodos. Me sorprendí de los tamaños de las cerezas, nada que ver a lo que uno vé comúnmente en los supermercados. Agradecemos a todo el equipo, especialmente a María y Rolf nuestros supervisores, son lo mas! Gracias a Nick por la oportunidad y Andrew por los consejos :D Nos vamos a llevar lindos recuerdos de aquí. Muchas Gracias :D

don’t expect to work a lot of days here, this year was one day on and one off.. so if you don’t wanna make good money and enjoy your free time is good… up to you

This review has been done in March 2019 about my experience working at Reid Fruits from 18/12/2018 till 16/01/2019. Even though sometimes it is complicated to be 100% accurate, since there are tons of factors that can apply differently to everyone, I will do my best to give all the information needed to anyone who is planning to work as a cherry picker in this farm in the years to come.

Reid Fruits has an agreement with another company called LYNX employment, which recruits people to work as cherry pickers during the cherry season in Tasmania. I recommend you to go and read my review about LYNX employment on its Facebook because it deserves a separate one.

If you have never done cherry picking before, you should know that it can be demanding, especially to achieve the pace of work needed to make the whole stay profitable. In order to achieve that, you will spend the first few days adapting. In a month that swings by pretty fast, that’s already pretty counterproductive financially.

There is also the fact that cherries are a ‘sensitive fruit’, which means that: if it rains = no work, if it’s too hot = no work. Obviously no work = no money in your pocket. If it rains too much, the cherries get damaged, and damaged cherries should not go in your bucket according to Reid’s standards. It’s therefore harder to fill a bucket and consequently harder to make money faster.

Personally I had an average of 13 buckets per day. Buckets were paid 7.8 AUD each, before taxes, but we only found out about that number on the day of the induction.

I had the expectations of making around 1000 AUD per week after paying expenses (accommodation, taxes, food and trip to Tasmania) but I ended up making around 300 AUD. I kept track of all my buckets and I was underpaid by 10 buckets at the end of the season. They tell you that they can be claimed but I haven’t heard of anyone getting them paid back.

It is also important to note that Reid has a pretty high standard when it comes to picking; my guess is that they are trying to cut down expenses on ‘Quality Control’ so they make the pickers try to get the best fruit. You have to separate double stemmed cherries, they can’t have any sort of bruise or mark, they can’t be unripe, etc. And if your bucket has a bad combination of all the aforementioned, they can deduct it from your payment. If you don’t see this so far, picking the best fruit is very counterproductive for you. So there is a big collision of interests. In order to pick faster, you will have to add the perfect amount of ‘bad’ fruit that can be allowed in a bucket, allowing you to achieve your perfect speed pace.

The ‘luck’ factor is also important in my opinion. There are some sections in the orchard with beautiful huge cherries that will make your buckets fill up in less than 15min. unfortunately, the sections everyone is assigned to are pretty random and they change as the season moves on and the fruit is ready to be picked.

The last topic I can think of is about the supervisors. Due to the company’s initiative to improve quality, they are forced to be really annoying and on top of you all the time. Again, depending on luck you can get better or worse ones. It also depends on your tough skin to avoid paying attention to them. Because of the interest collision I mentioned before, they will constantly ask you to fill up your buckets more, and so on. It’ll be totally up to you if you choose to keep trying to deliver not-so-full-buckets or not, it’s another constant authority-boundary testing.

My conclusion is that I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who is going to do it for the money, mainly if it is the first time you will be doing cherry picking. Apparently there are farms in Victoria or even in Tasmania itself that don’t care much about the fruit quality you pick and they may even pay more per bucket. Tasmania is a beautiful place however, so trying the experience for any backpacker is definitely tempting, and living in the farm’s campsite will give you a lot of time to socialize and meet people from many corners of the world.

dont want to do picking here anymore, pay is low and rules r strict, and unlucky for me i met an Australian supervisor r so straight and strict that upset me all the time

Was told we’d work six weeks, only worked three. I was then spammed text messages about this bonus of 10 dollars a lug, but you have to wait till the end of the season to get this bonus, it’s been a month since the end of the season and I still haven’t got my bonus, so Reid’s you’re full of it, I wouldn’t work for you again. And the supervisors are annoying as, I just want to pick in peace but they put you on edge when they come up behind you and yell at you or scream at you from the end of the row. Yeah not worth three weeks of cherry picking.

Bloody terrible! Half green, and what was not green was split