Nearly half a century ago, an upstart California produce company opened its doors with a commitment to bring consumers new, unique and better-tasting fruits and vegetables.

That company, Sun World International, LLC (Sun World), this week celebrates 45 years of bold innovation and industry leadership.

Established in June 1976, Sun World has introduced consumers to a steady stream of innovative products in the 1980s that now seem commonplace, including seedless watermelons, seedless grapes, colored sweet peppers, chopped lettuce, vine-ripened tomatoes, as well as more flavorful plum, peaches, apricots, mangos, and citrus.

Throughout the 1990s, presaging its future as a breeding & licensing business, Sun World started investing even more significantly in its own fruit breeding efforts and in the early 2000s the company was the first to develop and license proprietary table grape varieties and their respective Intellectual Property to like-minded growers and marketers outside of the United States.

The company said that during the last four decades it has developed and introduced dozens of important new fruit varieties and brands such as Superior Seedless, Sable Seedless, Midnight Beauty, Autumncrisp, Adora Seedless, and Scarlotta Seedless, Black Diamond and Honeycot.

To date, Sun World has a network of over 1,800 licensed growers in 16 countries who produce Sun World-bred fruit varieties year-round in most of the world’s major growing regions. To support its breeding efforts, Sun World opened the doors of its state-of-the-art Center for Innovation in November 2020, which will become the home of extraordinary new proprietary fruit varieties.

“The passion to innovate has been in our DNA for the last 45 years and this passion has been integral to our future vision and business philosophy. With our new state-of-the-art Center for Innovation, we are intent on doing things differently and we are excited to see what the future holds,” said David Marguleas, Sun World’s CEO & President.

To be relevant in today’s world one must be always improving and delivering a better more sustainable product whatever that product is and Sun World is working hard to deliver more great products. We are looking forward to introducing more flavorful, more sustainable and better-tasting fruit varieties to growers, retailers and consumers in the future.