Friday, June 19, 2020 at 3:12PM Melissa (Gillette) Burchett is a 5th generation grower and Mark's daughter. Melissa and her brother Greg both work for our packing operations. They were asked by Sunkist to make a social media piece about cara cara navels. With Greg behind the camera (Iphone), they were able to put this video together in only a couple of hours. We think they missed their calling :)
Friday, June 19, 2020 at 8:59AM We hope everyone has stayed safe and healthy throughout this pandemic ordeal. Although it is far from over, normalcy has begun to seem more of a reality.
Here at our ranches and packing operations everything is fine but it has been an interesting time. All of our employees have stayed safe and continue to work harvesting and packing fruit. The demand for citrus, and a great source of vitamin C has increased business and our customers have counted on us to keep everyone safe and to keep shipping citrus.
We have had to implement many safety measures, from plexiglass partitions, additional employee lounges, addditional hand washing stations and hand sanitizers to pre screening employees on a daily basis.
Our employees have been the biggest help over the past weeks. Having to wear face masks and maintaining social distancing in a packing and farming operation is not easy and can only be done with cooperation from all of our employees.
Our oranges, mandarins and lemons cannot wait to be harvested and need to come off our trees in a timely manner. So thank you to our employees and our customers for helping to keep everything running and enabling us to finish up our citrus season.
We wish everyone well and please keep safe.
Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 11:08AM As a supplier of fresh citrus, we here at Gillette Citrus are working day and night to supply oranges to all of our customers. As always, we are following all USDA the CDC guidelines to keep our product and employees safe. We thank our employees for continuing to come to work in these trying times and our promise to them is to keep our facilities clean and sanitized and to provide the safest workplace possible.
As an essential business supplying agricultural products, we are doing our best to keep up with demand. Our sales team at Sunkist is providing all the essential harvesting and packing supplies and providing guidance on CDC protocols during this time of Covid 19.
We wish for everyone to be safe and healthy and we will get through this crisis together (just at least six feet apart) :)
Tuesday, February 11, 2020 at 3:17PM Last week we hosted a Farm to Table event in our orchards. The focus was on Sunkist blood and cara cara oranges.
We hosted food editors and writers from all over the U.S. We tour the orchards and then were treated to an amazing brunch featuring bloods and cara cara recipes prepare by two Top Chefs from the tv show Top Chef, Chef Bruce and Chef Sally.
Mark, past Chairman of Sunkist and current Vice-Chairman of Sunkist, gave the tour and talked about farming practices while his daughter Melissa (a 5th generation citrus grower) talked about her life growing up in a citrus orchard and her current role with Gillette Citrus.
The day finished with a tour of our packing faciltiy by led by Mark's son Greg. Thank you to everyone at Sunkist for organizing this great event and to our guests who traveled from as far away as Maine and New York to visit and learn more about what it takes to grow and ship quality Sunkist fruit.
Monday, October 28, 2019 at 9:12AM We have begun harvest and packing of the 2019-20 navels. The fruit was one week later in maturity than last year mainly due to the brix-acid ratio. We are seeing better brix levels than last year but are also seeing a higher acid content which has delayed the start of harvest compared to last season. This higher brix is a good sign that we will have a great eating piece of fruit, as a higher acid level helps bring out that delicious navel flavor california oranges are known for. Fruit size is also better than last season by at least one size. Stay tuned....