AGRICULTURE: Pyramid in the Sun

Under a bright California sky last week, some 500 fruit growers, packers and distributors gathered in the small town of Corona near Los Angeles to have lunch, dedicate a new building, and listen to some statistics. The building was an $800,000 freezing plant and warehouse built to store more than 1,250,000 cases of Sunkist Growers, Inc.’s newest product: Sunkist frozen lemonade concentrate. The statistics were even more impressive: since introducing its frozen lemonade concentrate in 1950, Sunkist has boosted sales 5,000% : 7.000,000 cases in fiscal 1953 and 10 million expected in 1954.

For the growers at Corona, the success of Sunkist’s new lemonade concentrate meant more vitamins for the growth of the world’s largest food cooperative. Since 1893, when a few growers took the name “Southern California Fruit Exchange” and joined forces to market their crop, the co-op has blossomed into a huge pyramid with a base of 14,000 growers and an apex of hired managers who run the business. Not many of Sunkist’s growers own more than 15 acres apiece. But together they market about 75% of all the citrus fruit in California and Arizona—28,600,000 boxes of lemons, oranges and grapefruit each year—and run a $500 million business. After all expenses in its ’51-52 season, Sunkist returned to growers a total of $167 million, and the co-op expects an increase of up to 20% when the figures are in for the fiscal year just ended.

A typical grower at last week’s dedication was Paul R. Daggs, a spare, twinkling-eyed man who lives in Upland, Calif, and has 25 acres of lemons and oranges a few miles outside town. After Daggs sprays, irrigates and fertilizes his fruits, the co-op will pick, sort, grade and market about 16,000 boxes of oranges and lemons for him. They should bring approximately $150,000 on the market and, after all expenses, leave Daggs with a $15,000 profit for his year’s work. Daggs sometimes complains about the heavy pyramid over his head, but he wouldn’t market any other way. Says Grower Daggs: “You just can’t argue with results.”

Buddha & the Lemons. The man who carries most of the weight of the organization is a heavy-set grower named Paul S. Armstrong. 61, who looks like a benevolent Buddha. As general manager of Sunkist Growers, Inc. since 1931, Armstrong has the job of coordinating 175 little packing associations, each with its own packing plant, setting advertising and research policies, and devising new citrus products.

Some of Armstrong’s ideas have borne golden fruit. Sunkist was the first to can or bottle any kind of citrus product (orange juice) in 1933, and was the first to go into volume production for the retail market two years later. Today, Sunkist’s processing business nets more than $36 million a year from juices and frozen concentrates. Even the waste is used to make such citrus byproducts as citrus pectins, citric acid and lemon oils. Florida grows more oranges, but California and Arizona have the lemon business practically to themselves. Sunkist grows 82% of the nation’s total, is converting poorer-grade orange orchards to lemons by grafting lemon branches on full-grown orange trees. Though oranges are still the biggest part (72%) of the co-op’s business, Armstrong’s lemonade business takes all the farmers grow. “And the nicest part of the whole thing,” says Armstrong, “is that these sales haven’t hurt sales of fresh lemons. They’ve been growing too.”

Suburbs & Smog. Nevertheless, the co-op has its troubles. Steadily growing industrial suburbs have cut some 30,000 acres off the California citrus growers’ orchards since World War II, and California’s oranges have been getting smaller over the past few years. Sunkist’s researchers are at work on the orange mystery, trying to discover if it is the smog, the lack of rain, or some unnamed malady that stunts the oranges. But Sunkist’s 14,000 fruit growers are sure that Armstrong and his researchers will lick these problems, as they have others in the past.