FIELD AND GROVE MAGAZINE
Profiling Southwest Florida’s Agribusiness Community

Here is an opportunity that any die hard citrus label collector will simply not want to miss. The Florida Citrus Label Collector's Association is hosting a Florida Citrus Label Show Saturday, April 18 at the Winter Garden Museum between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Collectors bearing antique Florida citrus labels will be available to show, buy, sell and trade labels within their collections. For those who have never been able to attend a show before should make every effort to go to this one. This is the perfect time to visit the museum and get an up-close and personal view of some very rare and valuable Florida labels.

The museum is located at 1 North Main Street (downtown) in Winter Garden and can be contacted by calling 407-656-3244 or 407-6565544 for more information.

For those who don't know much about citrus labels here's an abridged history:

The first citrus crate labels were probably produced in California in the late 1800's following the advent of lithography. Much of the artwork was created by well-known artists who did not sign their work because it was considered commercial in nature.

Florida Grower Press in Tampa was one of this state's primary lithographic printers and a major printer of citrus labels. The labels had a great run and were used extensively for about 60 years until World War II when shortages of wood and metal mandated the replacement of crates with cardboard boxes. The new boxes sported pre-printed brand names making the labels virtually obsolete.

The colorful labels were much more than just decorative. Each label was registered with the Department of Agriculture and it relayed to the buyer the brand name and what grade of fruit was contained within the crate. The background color notated the grade:

 blue - Grade A, red - Grade B, yellow or green - Grade C.

Many of the labels' designs incorporated true personal touches, telling the buyer something of the history of the family that owned the grove where the fruit was harvested. Some families named fruit varieties after indigenous flowers or birds. The Lake Wales Citrus Growers Association, for example, always promoted a royalty theme in their labels because Lake Wales was known as the 'Crown Jewel of the Ridge'.

The labels are more than just beautiful and utilitarian or representative of a time when shipments of fresh fruit and vegetables were eagerly awaited up north. For consumers across the country, the labels affixed to the end of a wooden crate paid homage to a far away Florida citrus grove and a place in the warm sun of which most could only dream.

I want to give a big shout out to Brenda Burnette of the Florida Citrus Label Collector's Association in West Palm Beach who provided the Bounty label graphic to FIELD AND GROVE.

By Cindy Cutright

Cindy Cutright has spent the better part of the last 25 years engaged in marketing and advertising in Southwest Florida. And though her background is in print media, her embrace of the online publishing concept has been admirable to say the least.