DiGiorgio Corporation
DiGiorgio corporation was a fruit-growing corporation and eventual conglomerate in the 20th century. Once a vast company, owning much of California's central valley farm land, and multibillion-dollar corporation, a massive restructuring in the 1990s limited its breadth. DiGiorgio now distributes food products under its White Rose brand name to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Joseph DiGiorgio (born Giuseppe DiGiorgio, 1874 in Cefalu, Sicily) immigrated to the United States in 1888, becoming a middleman for fruit sales. He founded the Baltimore Fruit Exchange in 1904 on borrowed money and eventually owned fruit exchanges in several major regions of the east coast. In 1911 was able to purchase the Earl Fruit Company, a California shipper to integrate further in the produce chain. In 1919, he bought 5845 acres of land outside Arvin in California's San Joaquin Valley. A year later, DiGiorgio founded DiGiorgio Fruit Co. His success came when he obtained water for the arid California land by drilling wells hundreds of feet deep. By 1929, just ten years after his original land purchase, DiGiorgio's company was the largest fruit-packing plant in the nation.
The produce grown on the west coast became the main focus of the business. The end of Prohibition in 1933 saw DiGiorgio venture into the winery business, forming Del Vista Wine Co and bulk wine was shipped to the east coast in large tank cars. Di Giorgio was the largest wine producer in the country at that time though wine became a minor part of the corporation later. By 1946, the company occupied 33 square miles (85 km2) of the San Joaquin Valley as well as land as far north as Washington state, in Marysville and south to the Mexican border. It was the largest grape, plum and pear grower in the world. Its revenue rose from $5.7 million in 1938 to $18.2 million in 1946, with DiGiorgio and his family owning 59% of the stock.
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