Florida's Natural Growers

Last updated

Florida's Natural
Type Agricultural cooperative
Founded1933 (1933)
Headquarters,
Members1100 [1]
Website floridasnatural.com

Florida's Natural Growers is an agricultural cooperative based in Lake Wales, Florida. It is currently owned by over 1,100 grower members. It was the only national orange juice maker that used only US-grown fruit (grown by its cooperative members in Florida) in its products; however, this policy changed starting in May 2022. [2] After that time, Florida's Natural products included concentrated orange juice from Mexico.

Contents

History

Florida's Natural Growers was founded in 1933 as Florida Citrus Canners Cooperative. Its initial operations included canning juice and grapefruit sections for its members, [3] and in 1938 began extracting juice with automated machines. During World War II, the company produced concentrated orange juice for the military; after the war, 80% of the juice the company produced was in frozen concentrate form to meet consumer demand for the relatively new, convenient form.

In the 1960s, consumer demand shifted to ready-to-drink orange juice, and frozen concentrate sales declined while demand for chilled juices increased. In 1969, the cooperative took the name Citrus World and adopted the current name, Florida's Natural Growers, in 1998. It is currently composed of 12 representatives of 14 citrus cooperatives: Waverly Growers Cooperative, Lake Placid Cooperative, Ben Hill Griffin Inc., Haines City Citrus Growers Association, Orange Growers Marketing Association, Lake Wales Citrus Growers Association, Hunt Brothers Cooperative, Citrus Marketing Services Inc, Peace River Packing Company, Dundee Citrus Growers Association, Winter Haven Citrus Growers Association, and Umatilla Citrus Growers Association, Southern Gardens Citrus Growers, and Lykes. [4]

In 2001, the company opened the "Grove House", a visitor's center across the street from its Lake Wales, Florida processing plant. [5] The Grove House is open Monday through Friday 10 am to 5 pm, and is closed from Memorial Day through the last day of September.

Products and marketing

Florida's Natural Growers Florida's Natural Growers.jpg
Florida's Natural Growers

Florida's Natural produces citrus juices (mainly orange juice and lemonades) under the Florida's Natural, Coral Reef Juice Co. and Donald Duck brand names.

The company's primary marketing strategy is to differentiate itself from main competitors Simply Orange, Minute Maid and Tropicana. It does this by emphasizing its cooperative organization ("Florida's Natural. Together, from Tree to Table"). By comparison, Simply Orange and Minute Maid are both owned by Coca-Cola, while Tropicana is owned in a joint venture by French private equity firm, PAI Partners with PepsiCo keeping a 39% non-controlling stake. As a citrus cooperative, Florida's Natural uses citrus grown by its cooperative members in Central and South Florida in its products (as well as concentrated citrus juice from Mexico), and seeks to provide the maximum return for fruit to its members, supporting these citrus growers and their families.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orange juice</span> Juice made from oranges

Orange juice is a liquid extract of the orange tree fruit, produced by squeezing or reaming oranges. It comes in several different varieties, including blood orange, navel oranges, valencia orange, clementine, and tangerine. As well as variations in oranges used, some varieties include differing amounts of juice vesicles, known as "pulp" in American English, and "(juicy) bits" in British English. These vesicles contain the juice of the orange and can be left in or removed during the manufacturing process. How juicy these vesicles are depend upon many factors, such as species, variety, and season. In American English, the beverage name is often abbreviated as "OJ".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tangerine</span> Orange-colored citrus fruit

The tangerine is a type of citrus fruit that is orange in color, that is considered either a variety of Citrus reticulata, the mandarin orange, or a closely related species, under the name Citrus tangerina, or yet as a hybrid of mandarin orange varieties, with some pomelo contribution.

Rose's lime juice, often known simply as Rose's, is a sweetened concentrated fruit juice patented in 1867. This was the world's first commercially produced fruit concentrate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citrus production</span> Cultivation or planting of citrus fruits

Citrus production encompasses the production of citrus fruit, which are the highest-value fruit crop in terms of international trade. There are two main markets for citrus fruit:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minute Maid</span> American beverage company

Minute Maid is a product line of beverages, usually associated with lemonade or orange juice, but which now extends to soft drinks of different kinds, including Hi-C. Minute Maid is sold under the Cappy brand in Central Europe and under the brand "Моя Семья" in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Minute Maid was the first company to market frozen orange juice concentrate, allowing it to be distributed throughout the United States and served year-round. The Minute Maid Company is owned by The Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest marketer of fruit juices and drinks. The firm opened its headquarters in Sugar Land Town Square in Sugar Land, Texas, United States, on February 16, 2009; previously it was headquartered in the 2000 St. James Place building in Houston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sunkist Growers, Incorporated</span> American citrus company

Sunkist Growers, Incorporated is an American citrus growers' non-stock membership cooperative composed of 6,000 members from California and Arizona. It is currently headquartered in Valencia, California. Through 31 offices in the United States and Canada and four offices outside North America, its sales in 1991 totaled $956 million. It is the largest fresh produce shipper in the United States, the most diversified citrus processing and marketing operation in the world, and one of California's largest landowners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juice Train</span> Tropicana unit trains

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Welch's</span> American company

Welch Foods Inc., commonly known as Welch's, is an American company, headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts. It has been owned by the National Grape Cooperative Association, a co-op of grape growers, since 1956. Welch's is particularly known for its grape juices, jams and jellies made from dark Concord grapes and its white Niagara grape juice. The company also manufactures and markets an array of other products, including refrigerated juices, frozen and shelf-stable concentrates, organic grape juice, fruit snacks, and dried fruit. Welch's has also licensed its name for a line of grape-flavored soft drinks since 1974. Welch's grape and strawberry soda flavors are currently licensed to Global Beverage Corporation. Other popular products that use the Welch's name are the fruit snacks made by The Promotion In Motion Companies, Inc.

Anthony Talamo Rossi was an Italian-born American who founded Tropicana Products, a producer of orange juice, in 1947 in Bradenton, Florida. It grew from 50 employees to over 8,000 in 2004, expanding into multiple product lines and becoming one of the world's largest producers and marketers of citrus juice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tropicana Products</span> Orange/fruit juice and soft drink maker

Tropicana Brands is an American fruit-based beverage company. It was founded in 1947 by Anthony T. Rossi in Bradenton, Florida. Between 1998 and 2021 it was a subsidiary of PepsiCo. In August 2021, 61% of Tropicana was sold along with the rest of PepsiCo's juice brand portfolio for $3.3 billion to PAI Partners. PepsiCo retained the remaining 39% of the companies ownership.

Old South is the name of a brand of frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ) sold in Canada since 1939. It produces a number of different kinds of orange juice, as well as other fruit juices. The brand was formerly owned by the Pasco Beverage Company, a citrus growers' cooperative, and was bought by Louis Dreyfus Citrus, the third largest orange juice producer in the world, which is owned by the Louis Dreyfus Group.

Donald Duck is the name of a brand of frozen and refrigerated orange juice by the Florida's Natural Growers agricultural cooperative, which was known as Citrus World from 1969 to 1998, and before that as the Florida Citrus Canners Cooperative. The brand was introduced in 1940 and is the cooperative's oldest brand. Donald Duck, one of Walt Disney's cartoon and comic book characters, is the mascot for the brand. He appears on the packaging and marketing, and in its advertising. For many years Donald Duck also appeared on the juice plant's water storage tank in Lake Wales, until 1998, when the cooperative decided to remove the Donald Duck logo as part of its name change and rebranding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slice (drink)</span> Fruit flavored soft drink

Slice was a line of fruit-flavored soft drinks originally manufactured by PepsiCo and introduced in 1984 but discontinued by PepsiCo in North America in the late 2000s. Slice was reintroduced in the United States and Canada as a brand of Organic food by "New Slice Ventures LLC", which acquired the trademark rights in those countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hi-C</span> Fruit juice-flavored soft drink

Hi-C is a fruit juice-flavored drink made by the Minute Maid division of The Coca-Cola Company. It was created by Niles Foster in 1946 and released in 1947. The sole original flavor was orange.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simply Beverages</span> American fruit juice brand

Simply Beverages is an American fruit juice company based in Apopka, Florida that was founded in 2001 and is a brand of The Coca-Cola Company. It makes several not-from-concentrate orange juices and other fruit juices that are sold refrigerated in a clear plastic bottle with a green twist top and large green seal. The bottles have a wide body that starts tapering to a narrow neck at the top of the label.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orange (fruit)</span> Citrus fruit

An orange is a fruit of various citrus species in the family Rutaceae ; it primarily refers to Citrus × sinensis, which is also called sweet orange, to distinguish it from the related Citrus × aurantium, referred to as bitter orange.

Edwin L. Moore was a researcher for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). With Louis G. MacDowell and C. D. Atkins in the 1940s, he helped develop a new process for making frozen concentrated orange juice. Moore was inducted into the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame in 1986 for his contributions to the Citrus Industry and was inducted into the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame in 1983.

Citrus Hill was a brand of orange juice introduced by Procter & Gamble in the United States market in 1982, later used for other fruit juices and beverages.

Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida is a vertically integrated agricultural enterprise that harvests, transports and processes sugarcane grown primarily in Palm Beach County, Florida and markets the raw sugar and blackstrap molasses through the Florida Sugar and Molasses Exchange. The Cooperative is made up of 45 grower-owners who produce sugarcane on approximately 70,000 acres of some of the most fertile farmland in America, located in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). Sugarcane grown by Cooperative members is harvested, transported and processed. The raw sugar is then marketed to one of the ASR Group's sugar refineries. The Cooperative produces more than 350,000 tons of raw sugar annually.

Lena B. Smithers Hughes (1905–1987) was an American botanist who developed improved strains of the Valencia orange, a sweet orange that is grown in the United States mainly for the production of commercial orange juice. She was the first woman inducted into the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame and was also named to the Florida Women's Hall of Fame and the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame.

References

  1. "Florida's Natural Growers". Funding Universe. Retrieved May 15, 2010.
  2. "Pulp Fiction? Florida's Natural Now Made with Orange Juice Concentrate from Mexico". Truth in Advertising. Retrieved January 20, 2023.
  3. Florida’s Natural Growers Reports Outstanding Financial Results. [ permanent dead link ]Vending Market Watch. 26 Nov. 2008.
  4. "Meet the Co-op". Archived from the original on February 23, 2010. Retrieved January 29, 2010.
  5. "Grove House': A Fruitful Escape for Tourists". News Chief. March 29, 2001.