Sunsweet Growers

Sunsweet manufactures a variety of dried fruit and juice products, although it is best known for prunes. The company produces and distributes prunes, prune juice,^[2] cranberries, apricots, nectarines, pineapples, mangoes and dates. Other recent Sunsweet products include Ones (individually wrapped prunes), Jumbo Red Raisins (from large red flame Chilean grapes), PlumSweets (chocolate-covered prunes), PlumSmart plum juice, and Specialty mangoes, blueberries, cherries, and berry blends.

The company controls more than two-thirds (2/3) of the prune market worldwide.^[3]

Forty thousand (40,000) cases of fruit are marked and sealed for distribution daily at the factory headquarters while its juice products are bottled in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania.^[1] Over half the growers in California belong to Sunsweet.

In Santa Cruz, Chile, in 2004 after the two consecutive years of crop disaster in California, Sunsweet completed a prune drying facility where it made plans to grow and process the dried fruit in an attempt to avert any future disaster says.^[4] The entire U.S. exports about 48% of prunes worldwide while the two major competitors, Chile produces 13% (partially due to the Sunsweet facility and growing) and France only about 12%.^[5] These statistics are greatly affected by Sunsweet's production.