Nov. 17--LAKE WALES -- Florida's Natural Growers rode a red-white-and-blue advertising campaign to outperform its competitors in 2009.

But annual sales revenue still dropped 1.4 percent to $400.7 million and the Lake Wales growers' cooperative faces a challenging economic environment in 2010, said Edmond Seifried, an economist with Sheshunoff Consulting & Solutions of Austin, Texas.

"I think this recession is over, but the recovery is going to be long and slow," Seifried told more than 400 Florida's Natural members and their guests at the cooperative's 76th annual meeting Monday at the Lake Wales Country Club.

The good news for the nearly 1,000 cooperative growers was they earned $1.42 per pound solids for their oranges and 92.8 cents for grapefruit in the 2008-09 season, said Chief Financial Officer Chip Hendry.

Pound solids is a standard industry measure of the amount of juice with a certain sugar content squeezed from the fruit.

The Florida Department of Citrus estimated growers earned an average $1.23 per pound solids on 2008-09 oranges and 62 cents on grapefruit. That's below the estimated growers' break-even points of $1.25 for oranges and 80 cents for grapefruit.

While sales revenue dipped, sales volume (by gallons) grew 2.4 percent overall and by 2.8 percent for its main product, Florida's Natural not-from-concentrate (NFC) orange and grapefruit juices, said Walt Lincer, vice president of sales and marketing.

NFC juice is a chilled, ready-to-pour product that did not start out as frozen concentrate.

Volume sales of Florida's Natural NFC orange juice grew 4.5 percent, giving the Lake Wales company a 17.6 percent share of that market versus market leader Tropicana Products Inc., a Pepsi-Cola subsidiary, and runner-up Minute Maid, part of Coca-Cola Co.

"That's the highest market share in our history," Lincer said.

Tropicana's market share fell 1.6 percent while Minute Maid's fell 3.7 percent, he said.

Lincer credited the Florida's Natural marketing campaign, which stresses only its brand has 100 percent Florida juice while Tropicana and Minute Maid use Brazilian imports.

U.S. retailers face a tough challenge in the next three to five years, Seifried said.

Despite the end of the recession, consumers still hesitate to spend money out of fear hard times may not be over, he said. That's similar to the generation that came out of the Great Depression.

Seifried called this a "lite economy," which means consumers will tend to save more, fix before throwing out and buying new, shop at discount retailers and favor generic and private-label products over brands.

Florida's Natural officially added a 13th member to the cooperative, Lykes Bros. Inc. of Tampa, the state's second largest grower. Lykes has been supplying fruit to Florida's Natural for the past couple of seasons.

Other members include the Haines City, Dundee and Winter Haven growers associations, Ben Hill Griffin Inc. of Frostproof and Hunt Bros. Cooperative in Lake Wales. They own more than 50,000 acres of citrus groves.

Florida's Natural Growers operates a processing plant in Lake Wales, which employs 850 people, and a smaller juice packaging plant in Umatilla.

[ Kevin Bouffard can be reached at kevin.bouffard@theledger.com or at 863-422-6800. ]

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