Breeding and licensing group Sun World International is this week celebrating its 45th anniversary, having been founded in June 1976.
To mark the anniversary, the company has highlighted some of its achievements in areas such as product development and Intellectual Property management.
Sun World has introduced consumers to a number of innovative products that now seem commonplace, including seedless watermelons, seedless grapes, coloured sweet peppers, chopped lettuce and vine-ripened tomatoes.
The group has also helped to popularise more flavourful plums, peaches, apricots, mangoes, and citrus, and in recent times it has invested more significantly in its own fruit breeding efforts.
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 US.
Sun World has developed and introduced dozens of new fruit varieties and brands such as Superior Seedless, Sable Seedless, Midnight Beauty, Autumncrisp and many more.
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, the company opened the doors of its Center for Innovation in November 2020, which will become the home of 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,' said David Marguleas, Sun World’s CEO and president. '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.
'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 flavourful, more sustainable and better-tasting fruit varieties to growers, retailers and consumers in the future.'
