Among the older companies in the California citrus industry, Limoneira Co. in Santa Paula, CA, has been growing citrus in Ventura County since 1993 and will mark its 120th anniversary in 2013.

According to the company’s website, Limoneira grows a wide assortment of citrus products. Among them are Eureka and Lisbon lemons, Meyer lemons, seedless lemons and variegated pink lemons, Navel oranges, Valencia oranges, Cara Cara oranges, blood oranges, Minneola Tangelos, Satsuma Mandarins and pummelos. In addition to its citrus offerings, the company grows avocados, cherries and pistachios.

John CarterLemons, however, are a major focus, and Limoneira lemons are available year round. “We are exporting to Asia, Australia, South America and Europe, and distributing in North America with California and South American lemons,” John Carter, director of global sales, said in a written statement to The Produce News.

To boost awareness of the many uses of lemons, the company has launched a campaign called “Unleashing the Natural Power of Lemons.”

‘We have been introducing our campaign to retailers foodservice and wholesale accounts,” Mr. Carter said in the statement.

“Lemons are one of the most versatile items in the produce department,” he continued. “Our ‘Unleash’ campaign takes advantage of today’s technology, and it’s fun, informative and easy. Everyone knows that lemons are a great ingredient and recipe enhancer, but they also have many uses in the areas of health, lifestyle, beauty and cleaning. These applications are represented by fun icon images in conjunction with our consumer QR code that links to our website lemon shopper pages.”

The campaign is “about driving consumption in a fun and easy way,” he said in the statement. “It’s a given that lemons are in the produce department, but with consumers’ ever-increasing focus on natural products, we’d like them to think about lemons when they’re in the cleaning, health, beauty and household aisles” as well. “We want to help drive more lemon sales for our retail customers.”

In an interview with The Produce News Oct. 20, Mr. Carter elaborated on the “Unleash” campaign. “What we saw,” he said, “was a great opportunity to help compartmentalize a lot of the information that is out on the Internet and in magazines as it relates to how people use lemons. So what we did is put it into basically five categories” and to make it fun for the shopper, to utilize a QR code that takes the shoppers to the Limoneira website. There, they can “touch an icon that they are interested in, and we have all of the uses in a common format, with a picture, a benefit and a how-to, with the ultimate purpose of sharing that information with the shoppers to help them see how they can use lemons in so many ways, thus to increase consumption.”

In its marketing communications and public relations outreach, Limoneira is “always focused on connecting the customer and consumer to the tree,” Mr. Carter said in the statement. “We do this by having our growing, harvesting, packing and sales teams all under the same roof, right across the street from our packinghouse. It’s quick and it’s coordinated, and it helps us maintain control of our food-safety programs” such as GlobalGAP and the Global Food Safety Initiative.

“We continue to rate susperior on the GlobalGAP food-safety” audit, Mr. Carter said in the Oct. 20 interview.

Because all of Limoneira’s domestic fruit is coming through the same packinghouse in Santa Paula, “that helps us be very consistent in terms of how we measure quality and also from a customer service standpoint,” he said. It is important to “the people that purchase citrus” to know about “the personnel that we have in place and all the practices that we have in place” to assure food safety — including the GlobalGAP food-safety certification, and to know that it applies to all of the domestically-grown fruit the company handles because it is all packed in the same place, by the same team.

In California, Limoneira sources fruit from all growing districts. In addition, Mr. Carter said, Limoneira is now packing and marketing lemons grown by a group called Associated Citrus Packers in Arizona. “We are taking tyheir fruit and packing it here in Ventura County in the same packinghouse where we are doing all the other domestic fruit.”

Limoneira also has producers in Argentina, Chile and Mexico. “That fruit is not packed here,” he said.

In its Meyer lemon program Limoneira is doing a special holiday promotion. “This is fun stuff,” Mr. Carter said. “During the holiday season we are packing [Meyer lemons] in our stand-up plastic pouch utilizing our historic Santa label.” The label is, indeed, historic, in that it dates from the early 1900s.

“We just got in our Santa display and our Santa Meyer lemon bag,” he said. “It is awesome. It has our Santa display form our Santa carton, which we still utilize,” but also has a snow scene and a train scene, with the train powered by lemons. “The train number is 1893, which is the year we were founded.”