Sunkist Growers, Incorporated

Sunkist Growers, Incorporated

Sunkist headquarters in Valencia
Type	Agricultural marketing cooperative
Industry	Agriculture
Founded	1893
Founder	P.J. Dreher and Edward L. Dreher
Headquarters	Valencia, Santa Clarita, California, United States
Area served	California and Arizona
Products	citrus
Website	www.sunkist.com

Sunkist Growers, Incorporated is a citrus growers' non-stock membership cooperative composed of 6,000 members from California and Arizona. It is currently headquartered in the Valencia neighborhood of Santa Clarita, California. Through 31 offices in the United States and Canada and four offices outside North America, its sales in 1991 totalled $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.

In the late 1880s, California citrus growers began organizing themselves into cooperatives, with the goal of increasing profits by pooling their risk and increasing their collective bargaining power with jobbers and packers. The economic depression that began in 1893 worsened farmers' situations, and intensified their desire to self-organize to their own benefit.

In 1893, P.J. Dreher and his son, the "father of the California citrus industry" Edward L. Dreher (1877–1964), formed the Southern California Fruit Exchange in Claremont, a small college town near Los Angeles. It originally represented only growers of oranges: in 1896 lemon growers joined as well. The exchange soon included growers and groves in Pomona, Riverside and San Dimas in Los Angeles County, and Santa Paula, Saticoy, Fillmore, Rancho Sespe, Bardsdale and Piru in Ventura County; by 1905, the group represented 5,000 members, 45% of the California citrus industry, and renamed itself the California Fruit Growers Exchange. In 1952, it changed its name to Sunkist Growers, Inc.