Cherry Products Limited R&D Tax Credit Success Story

The agricultural sector is facing enormous commercial pressures. Rising material input and labour costs, along with pricing pressure from farm retail and wholesale customers, have led to shrinking profit margins throughout the whole supply chain.

For manufacturers such as Cherry Products, this has increased the need to develop equipment that improves operational efficiency for end users, while also delivering manufacturing efficiencies and cost savings within their own production processes.

Against this background, Cherry Products identified technical equipment development opportunities through close collaboration with customers and OEM partners. These opportunities focused on improving the performance, adaptability, and usability of agricultural attachments operating in demanding field environments.

While the objectives were clear, achieving them required the development of new concepts and systems where the technical outcomes could not be guaranteed at the outset.

Cherry Products faced multiple challenges relating to the integration of new attachment systems across multiple vehicle platforms. These included combining mechanical and hydraulic components without compromising reliability, as well as achieving consistent performance under real-world operating conditions.

There were no readily available solutions that could simply be adopted or adapted. As a result, the company undertook extensive concept iterations, technical evaluation, and prototype testing to determine whether its concepts could function as intended at a commercial scale.

Cherry Products carried out technically challenging R&D projects, including the development of a universally interchangeable vehicle ballast and storage system, alongside highly manoeuvrable and autonomous field-topping machinery.

The projects involved iterative development activity to resolve mechanical, hydraulic, and operational challenges identified during the integration process.

Easy R&D’s team were able to work closely with Cherry’s specialist team through both on-site and remote reviews of development activity. This collaboration demonstrated that the work to overcome technical challenges was eligible for R&D tax relief.

The scheme is designed to encourage this type of technical engineering advancement and support company expansion in the UK. Easy R&D acts not only as an advisor, but also transfers R&D knowledge and understanding to the client team.

Our support of Cherry Products in reclaiming a portion of their R&D costs will help enable further investment, improving efficiency and competitive advantage in the UK agricultural sector.

We believe our support extends well beyond the preparation of an R&D claim. In this case, site visits allowed us to see first-hand that Cherry Products’ processes and capabilities demonstrated a genuine commitment to structured R&D.

We continue to support our clients throughout the year with tools, guidance, and advice to help embed effective R&D practices into their ongoing development activities.