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Shippers learn they must change to thrive, and holiday shoppers are giving the citrus shippers a lift. One grower says: Send your freezin' friends some fruit.
By TERESA BURNEY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 25, 2001
When Dick Edwards was growing up in Ohio, Christmas just wasn't Christmas without the oranges his grandfather sent from Florida.
"Now I kind of took over," said the 76-year-old New Port Richey resident as he pushed a shopping cart full of oranges to his car at the Sun Groves shop in Holiday last week.
Edwards already had sent a box of grapefruit and oranges to a sister back in Ohio and a box of oranges to a daughter in Connecticut through Sun Groves. The two half-bushel bags of navel oranges in his basket were for another daughter, who lives just north of Atlanta. He was headed there for Christmas.
"Boy, I get nothing but raves" about the fruit, said Edwards, a retired fishing worm farmer who now works as a security guard to supplement his Social Security.
It's customers like Edwards, who remember the joy of finding an orange in the toe of their stocking on snowy Northern Christmas mornings, who keep Florida's business of gift citrus fruit shipping healthy, despite competition from the Internet and a generation of people too busy to peel an orange.
Most of Florida's oranges are made into juice. Less than 10 percent are sold as whole oranges, and only a small percentage of that, the prettiest ones, are deigned good enough to be included in gift baskets.
While the market for whole oranges sold in supermarkets and other outlets has been eroding in "double-digit fashion" because consumers do not want to bother with peeling the juicy, sticky fruit, the market for gift fruit is holding its own and appears to be growing by 3 percent to 5 percent each year, said George Horvath, gift fruit marketing manager for the Florida Department of Citrus.
Horvath has done marketing studies to find out why people choose to send citrus as gifts and found that sending a box of oranges is equivalent to sending postcards of sandy beaches, palm trees and alligators. It cries out, "I'm in Florida and you aren't."
"It's kind of an eat-your-heart-out message" to Northern relatives coping with armpit-deep snowdrifts and gray skies, he said.
Now Horvath is trying to figure out how to get people who live outside the state to send Florida citrus to others who do not live here.
"That is really the tougher proposition," he said.
For years, the gift fruit shipping business was a sure thing, said Jim Guedry, owner of Citrus Country Groves of Florida in Wesley Chapel and president of the Florida Gift Fruit Shippers Association.
There was plenty of demand from winter residents and tourists who wanted to send fruit back home, just as their parents before them had done.
"You go to Florida, and what do you do? You send back Florida fruit," Guedry said. "Our logo for many many years was "Send your freezin' friends some fruit.' "
And the senders didn't care too much about fancy packaging. So shippers just put the oranges in nicely padded boxes, called the post office and that was that.
"Nobody complained, and we didn't think we needed to do anything different," Guedry said. "No matter what, the fruit itself was just awesome to people."
Then, as the Internet began to grow in popularity, shippers started to see sales go down. After all, now people could use their computers to order everything from chocolates to cherries delivered in designer-created baskets filled with other gourmet doodads as well. All it took was a few clicks of a mouse and a credit card.
Citrus shippers had to get creative. To compete, they began offering to send the fruit in baskets instead of the plain boxes and started including things other than just the fruit. Little cans of "Florida Sunshine," fudge alligators and coconut patties became popular. So did gourmet foods from places other than Florida. And many shippers started selling their baskets on the Internet as well.
"Now our basket business is on the upswing," Guedry said.
Last year, roughly 3.8-million packages of gift fruit were shipped out of the state, the Florida Gift Shippers estimate.
Baskets, rather than boxes of fruit, are a big part of Sun Groves' business, too, said Bud Llewellyn, general manager of the operation in Holiday and Safety Harbor.
John Vesely, 75, used to send boxes of oranges to his relatives in Wisconsin. Now he sends fancy fruit boxes that include apples, pears, chocolate-covered bing cherries, nuts, even cheese from his native Vermont.
"Look at that," he said, pointing to a picture of a mouth-watering "Holiday Gift Tower" offering in Sun Groves' catalog. "And it came the way it looks."
Llewellyn said Sun Groves' Internet business is doing well "considering there is a lot of competition for gift giving on the Internet."
Still, most of his customers, like Vesely, end up coming to the store where they can sip fresh-squeezed gifts and browse through a variety of jams, jellies, honeys and things made from seashells.
"It's amazing how many people will receive our catalog, fill it out and then bring it in," said Llewellyn. "It's something for them to do."
But this year, customers showed up later than usual, said many shippers.
Typically, the 10th of December has been the busiest day for shipping fruit that buyers wanted to arrive before Christmas, said Guedry. But that date has moved forward a few days in recent years. However this year, Monday the 17th seemed to be the big rush day, Guedry said.
"We have had a lot of what I would call last-minute Christmas shoppers," said Kathy Oleson, manager of Boyett Groves in Hernando County's Spring Lake area. "I think people were a little bit undecided this season and finally decided, "Oh well, Christmas is almost here so we had better get it in gear.' "
Some shippers credit the slow start to the warm weather, while others think that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks kept snowbirds, some of the biggest senders of gift citrus, from coming down as early as usual.
"Hot weather and the war. I think that's got a lot of people's minds," said Guedry.
Despite the delay, the customers did finally show up this year, and most shippers report sales are as strong or slightly stronger than last year.
The fruit this year is plentiful as well -- and sweet, despite a slight green tinge caused by the slow-to-arrive cooler weather.
"We have had a very successful season," said John W. White, a retired architect and owner of Flying W Farms in Citrus County. White will sell between 2,000 and 3,000 90-pound boxes of citrus from the grove behind the business. The rarer red navel oranges are his biggest seller. Those that are not pretty enough to sell for eating he squeezes on the site into a dark pink juice.
White's is a small and direct operation. While many bigger shippers buy citrus from across the state and have it trucked to their headquarters, White has to walk only about 20 feet behind his stand to pick an orange. About 60 percent of his crop is sold locally, and the rest is shipped away. A blackboard in his open-air shop gives shipping rates east and west of the Mississippi.
Shippers such as White, who pick and ship from the same location, became scarce in the northern Tampa Bay area after freezes in the 1980s wiped out many of the trees and most growers replanted farther south.
White, who had just bought the grove land when the first freeze hit in 1983, replanted and keeps his fingers crossed every winter.
"If we get another one like that, we are gone," he said. "I bought this grove to play with, and it has played with me. It has been a long 20 years."
Howard Banes in nearby Floral City has gotten used to the risks of growing citrus on the northern edge of Florida's citrus belt. His grandmother grew oranges in the area beginning in the 1940s.
"My grandmother said, "The only thing that comes easy in agriculture is trouble,' " he said.
So he is counting his blessings this year.
"We've been blessed to have good fruit and good trees," he said. "We are doing just great. I know it sounds silly, but so far this year we have actually received more orders than last year."
So far, Banes Groves has shipped 4,000 orders and already has 500 to 600 orders for honeybell tangelos, which will not ripen until January.
"It makes us feel good," he said. "We feel like Santa Claus."
-- Staff writer Teresa Burney covers business and development in Hernando County and can be reached at 848-1434. Send e-mail to burney@sptimes.com.