The height of the plant is 5 to 20 cm, and the vine-like branches spread about 2 m. It has 5 to 10 mm ovate leaves and dark pink flowers, with curved petals and exposed stamens pointing forward, and the whole looks like a crane, with the flowers resembling the head and beak of a crane, so the cranberry is also known as "crane berry". The fruit is an ovoid berry 2 to 5 cm long, which turns from white to deep red and has a heavy, acidic and slightly sweet taste.
Harvesting methods include wet and dry. The vast majority of the wet method of harvesting, fruit farmers to cranberry fields filled with water, so that the water surface above the cranberry canes 15 to 20cm, cranberries will float to the surface of the water, the fruit farmers will be circled to a piece of the fruit, through the conveyor belt to send it to trucks; dry harvesting is the use of a kind of picker equipped with a comb-shaped conveyor belt, the picker will be cranberries from the branch off the picking, and directly conveyed to the sacks loaded on the back of the trucks for transportation. Cranberries harvested dry represent only 5 to 10 percent of their total mass and are sold primarily as fresh fruit.
Cranberries grow primarily in the colder northern hemisphere. The growth in production stems from the continued increase in demand for cranberry products, which are often sold as frozen fruit or processed into products such as canned goods, jams and juices because cranberry fruit does not tolerate storage and transportation.
Because of the unique taste and natural and efficient antibacterial and health effects, cranberries and their processed products in China's fruit and vegetable processing industry, the development prospects and products of the market outlook has great potential.
In our country, we have the only and the largest cranberry base in Asia: Red Sea Cranberry Base, which is located in Fuyuan City, Heilongjiang Province.
China's cranberry base began to introduce North American cranberries and research in 2010, the red sea plant industry in 2015 officially began in the city of Fuyuan, Heilongjiang Province, cranberry large-scale planting.
As of 2019, China's cranberry planting area of about 4,200 acres, 1 acre of cranberries is equivalent to the benefits of 50 acres of rice, 100 acres of corn production, is China's largest cranberry planting base. The cooperative model adopted by Red Sea Plant, a company to unite farmers planting, to buy back at a uniform product unit price.
In June 2017, Red Sea Plant and Fuyuan Municipal Government, Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Sciences to establish cooperation, with domestic and foreign processing, trade, branding and other professional organizations to create a cranberry capital belonging to the East, cranberry planting into a culturally integrated industry, to create China's first cranberry-themed cultural festival.
China's market demand is growing, China has become the second largest importer of cranberries. Foreign cranberry products are generally imported in the form of dried fruit, resulting in most consumers have not eaten fresh cranberry fruit.