In stark contrast to today's large publicly traded food companies, we at Sunsweet Growers are a family of Cooperative California Farmers. Founded in 1917 on the basic principles of fair, stable and sustainable prices for customers and farmers, it provided our forefather farmers a better chance to succeed in the marketplace against huge food conglomerates.

After more than 90 years, we still adhere to these basic beliefs and today Sunsweet Growers steadfastly remains one of the last pure farmer-owned cooperatives. The typical farm of our roughly 300 members averages just 50 acres, and even our board members (that’s some of them pictured to the right) still spend 90% of their working hours in the orchard. Our main offices aren't in a big city - most of us live and work in the area around Yuba City, California (the heart of our orchards) where we really enjoy the lifestyle in our town of less than 50,000 people.

Though originally founded as a prune cooperative, our expertise and products now extend to a wide range of ‘pure foods from the earth’ including healthy tree fruits, vine fruits and fruit juice items. All our products must meet the most exacting standards, because our personal reputations and pride tolerate no other result. After all, many of our families have been part of the Co-op for several generations and plan for their children and grandchildren to continue working the same orchards.

A stubborn pursuit of quality for over 90 years has made our Sunsweet brand one of the most widely known and respected food brands around today. The brand is so well known, in fact, that many are surprised to learn we remain a farmer-owned and directed cooperative, rather than a large food conglomerate like Kraft Foods®, General Mills® and ConAgra Foods®. Actually, we’re pretty proud of the reputation we’ve built around our belief in "pure foods from the earth" and strict adherence to our core values—even if it means annual sales that are less than 3% of the big guys.

Experts generally agree that farmers focused on high quality crops naturally operate in the greenest possible way, and these are our practices. It may be surprising to know that only special varieties of plums can become a prune. There are relatively few suitable prune growing regions in the world, and the soil and climate of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys are by far the best. We deeply understand the stewardship role we must play with our land in growing highly nutritious fruit, so much so that we’ve employed many green practices long before the term “green” was coined.

We rely on the bees and breezes to pollinate our trees. The Co-op operates twelve drying stations (the first step in bringing prunes to market) throughout the growing region. This allows us to dry the fruit locally, locking in its flavor and nutritional qualities at peak maturity, thereby achieving the high and extremely consistent nutritional value for which this super fruit is famous.

We take much care to use all of the prunes we receive from our orchards. Those large enough are pitted and sold as whole food prunes. Our proprietary pitters are designed to minimize the fruit flesh removed, yielding less waste and a further bonus of better taste (the flesh closest to the pits is the most flavorful). Even the pits themselves find a home as completely natural, nutrient-rich feed for livestock or as a renewable fuel source.

Large prunes that fail to pit cleanly are blended with prunes not large enough to be sold as dried fruit and then processed into juice providing yet another form for people to receive the rich nutritional benefits of whole food prunes.

Another example of our commitment to sustainability involves our energy consumption. For more than 20 years we’ve minimized our energy use and carbon footprint by preparing our products using food grade steam that’s generated as a by-product of another local company who creates efficient electricity for the public.

Sunsweet Naturals—Our Latest Commitment

In creating Sunsweet Naturals within the Co-op, we recognized our responsibility to not just preserve our existing green heritage, but to pioneer new sustainable technologies and products that are natural to higher standards. We believe natural foods retailers and consumers, in particular, will appreciate our devoted efforts to these ideals.

One of our first innovations for the naturals channel is our proprietary D’Noir™ process for handling the packing of prunes products. Heretofore, the technical requirements of packing a preservative-free prune with a reasonable shelf life meant either letting it become dry and hard so no mold could grow or preserving it through the use of a lot of heat and energy that resulted in fruit that was too mushy. The D’Noir process uses flash heat, to pack preservative-free prunes, juice and fiber products that avoid excess energy use and the devastating effects of heat on the product’s appetite appeal.

Our Sunsweet Naturals’  SupraFiber^® product demonstrates our further efforts to improve our sustainability performance. All of the D’Noir prune fiber used in this product comes from the fruit skin and pulp left over from our prune juice making process. Previously, this antioxidant and protein rich material had limited commercial application. Now as the key ingredient in a breakthrough fiber supplement, we’ve found a way to utilize nearly all parts of our prunes and just as importantly in a manner that delivers rich nutrition benefits to those who consume it. As an additional way to strengthen our Co-op’s commitment to this market, all Sunsweet Naturals products are available only to retailers with a serious, proven commitment to offering a wide range of natural food products.
With Sunsweet Naturals, we’ve even elected not to offer any direct web-based sales.