Coffee cherries require time to ripen and develop in order to produce sweeter, more complex flavors. And, like tomatoes, not all cherries on a coffee bean ripen at the same time. Cherry pickers undertake several sweeps of the farm, selectively plucking all of the ripe cherries until they are all collected. Hand-picking coffee cherries is time-consuming, but the significance of choosing only the freshest cherries to produce the best coffee cannot be emphasized.

To harvest the high quality and specialty coffee farmers prefer hand-picking over machine-picking. This process allows the unripe cherries to remain on the stems, allowing them more time to ripen and mature. Overripe cherries are also left behind so that they do not affect the flavor of the coffee. These over-ripe cherries later become compost when they naturally fall to the ground, offering their nutrients back to the plants.

Despite the advantages of selective hand-picking, machine-picking is still the most widely used process for picking cherries globally. Machines strip or shake entire pieces of cherries from coffee branches into collection containers indiscriminately. Although this approach is more efficient, it can result in cherry waste and quality control difficulties. However, the large production of coffee in some nations, particularly wealthier ones, makes the use of such machines inevitable and even necessary.