Sunkist Growers is off to a strong start this season, with fruit sizes smaller but volumes up, said Cassie Howard, senior director of category management and marketing.

In January, peak shipments of cara caras, blood oranges and minneolas joined promotable volumes of navels, pummelos, lemons and California mandarins.

On the marketing side, health and wellness will remain front and center for Sunkist in 2025, Howard said.

The co-op is partnering with the National Breast Cancer Foundation on limited-edition, co-branded pink ribbon packaging and matching merchandising for its cara cara program, dubbed the Power with the Pink Orange® program.

Cara caras, known as “the pink orange,” look like navels on the outside, but the seedless interior has a rich pink hue from the natural presence of lycopene.

Sunkist is the largest cara cara supplier. Shoppers can buy them in 2-, 3- and 5-pound bags with the limited-edition pink ribbon packaging. And Sunkist is supplying retailers with The Power with the Pink Orange campaign display bins, stackable towers and new in-store merchandising tools including info posters, info cards and channel rails, all with QR codes leading back to the Sunkist website, where consumers can learn more about the NBCF partnership.

Also new on the merchandising side, Howard said, are interchangeable, modular merchandising units that include variety-specific graphics that retailers can customize to align with in-store display needs and various retail footprints. They’re designed, Howard said, to present the full scope of in-season offerings, ensuring consistency across the entire citrus category.

In 2025, Sunkist will also reinforce its position as an industry leader in category management, Howard said.

Those include solutions to better understand citrus consumers, as well as benchmarking opportunities to drive the category to better support its retail partners.

“We’ve identified strategic positioning opportunities and consumer targeting that we believe will have an impact on preference for Sunkist-branded citrus and driving the category throughout the season,” Howard said. “This has not only directed our creative approach but will allow us to focus our advertising media spend on shoppers who over index in citrus consumption.”