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Citrus Shipper Forced To Pack It In

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 17, 2008

DADE CITY - Florida has one less citrus packing house.

Four years after moving his citrus-packing business from Wesley Chapel, Jim Guedry has shut down the commercial side of Citrus Country Groves. Guedry owned the fruit-packing business for 17 years.

The company's retail and gift operations will continue, Guedry said this week. But the commercial side, which packed citrus for Publix and other grocery chains, went dark June 30, a reflection of the Tampa Bay region's vanishing citrus stocks.

"With all that's happened, there's no citrus here," Guedry said. "And it's so expensive to haul it."

In recent years, acres of Pasco orange groves have given way to subdivisions and strip malls. The closing of Citrus Country's commercial packing operations leaves four state-sanctioned shippers in Pasco.

In all, Florida has 84 shipping companies licensed by the state Department of Citrus. Most of those are south of Interstate 4.

In Pasco, a handful of landowners remain dedicated to raising citrus. But they must send their fruit out of the region for processing and packaging.

"There are folks who are still committed" to citrus, said Richard Kinney, executive vice president of the Lakeland-based Florida Citrus Packers Inc. "Is it waning? Yes. Is it done? No."

As the Pasco housing boom was peaking in 2004, Guedry sold his prime spot at Interstate 75 and County Road 54 to a Honda motorcycle shop. He used the profits from that sale to jumpstart his multimillion project to turn the former Lykes Pasco juice plant on the north edge of Dade City into the Dade City Business Center.
Citrus Country Groves was the first tenant.

While the business center blossomed with companies large and small, the packing house languished. There simply wasn't enough locally grown citrus to keep it running, Guedry said, forcing the company to truck fruit long distances.

"We operated for years at a loss and just couldn't do it anymore," Guedry said.

The commercial operation shut down for the season in mid-June as usual, but its 100 employees had known for months that this season would be the last, Guedry said.

Guedry struck a deal with Scot Ballantyne, a tenant of the business center, to hire the packing house's former employees.

Ballantyne's South Pacific Trading Co. mixes and bottles energy drinks and other beverages a few dozen yards from the packing house site. Ballantyne is expanding his operations and expects to grow more in the fall thanks to another contract.

After a trip through new high-speed bottling lines, the products will have to be packed by hand for the trip to retailers, Ballantyne said.

Guedry plans to bring the gift operations north from their Clearwater warehouse in the coming months. That will bring 25 citrus workers to the plant that once employed thousands.

"Eventually, I want to bring that back here so we can keep citrus here," Guedry said.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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