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Florida's Natural Growers is a cooperative of citrus growers who own their own groves in the heart of central Florida. We are one of the largest organizations of growers and producers, with a membership base of 12 grower associations. The entire cooperative is made up of more than 1,000 grower members who own more than 50,000 acres of fine citrus groves. The cooperative, first of its kind, was organized in 1933 by a group of growers to market their crops. Our growers always have had a personal interest in bringing the best possible product to the market. They own the land, they plant and raise the trees, they process and package their own products, and they own the company, so they can guarantee the quality and purity of their juices and other citrus products.

Our first effort was a sectionizing plant, with the name of Florida Citrus Canners Cooperative. In 1938, the coop made a major investment in machines and changed from extracting juice manually to automated juice extraction. This important change led to the production of canned orange juice.

In the 1940s, America's wartime needs led the cooperative to build a concentrate plant on its property in Lake Wales, Florida, which produced juice for the military during World War II. This was also the beginning of the progression to producing and marketing grapefruit juice concentrate. In the same decade, the cooperative also signed an important licensing agreement with the Walt Disney Company, to establish the Donald Duck Brand of orange juice. The cooperative also expanded its marketing efforts behind 100 percent juices, including a national promotion of the Donald Duck brand by Clarence 'Ducky' Nash, the original voice of Donald Duck.

As consumers realized the convenience of frozen concentrate, Florida orange juice sales grew quickly. By 1954, 80 percent of the oranges handled by the cooperative went into frozen concentrate. Consumers in the 1960s began to ask for more chilled juice products. Citrus World responded by adding a variety of additional lines of juices and the chilled warehouses to store the refrigerated cartons of juice.

The demand for juices with fresh-squeezed taste increased rapidly in the 1980s. Chilled carton sales growth, especially for premium juices that are not made from reconstituted concentrate, led the cooperative to start its Florida's Natural brand in 1987. Because it is flash-pasteurized, it is the closest in taste and form to fresh squeezed juice you can get—nothing is added, nothing is taken away. Demand for Florida's Natural has grown steadily and expanded nationally. Ruby Red Grapefruit juice, another Florida's Natural® Brand Product, was introduced in 1989 as the first premium, not from concentrate grapefruit juice. It is still the number one premium grapefruit juice in the country.

To give a brief overview of the growth of our cooperative, in 1934 Citrus World was capable of producing only 3000 boxes of fruit per day. Today we routinely process 120,000 boxes in a day. In our first season, our cooperative produced 422,000 cases of finished products. Today, we produce 40 million cases under the names Florida's Natural®, Growers Pride®, Bluebird®, Texsun®, Adams®, Vintage®, and Donald Duck®. Florida's Natural Growers products are sold in almost every major US supermarket and in more than 60 countries around the world.

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