Dole plc

Castle and Cooke enter the food business with an investment in Hawaii's sugar industry. James Dole begins growing pineapple and incorporates his company as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Best known for its pineapples, Dole Food Company, Inc., is promotes its Dole brand of fresh and packaged food and nonfood products through what it calls its 'Dole Standard.' With its fully integrated operations of sourcing, growing, processing, distributing, and marketing, it is the world's largest producer and distributor of fresh fruits and vegetables. Specifically, the company is one of the world's leading producers of bananas and pineapples, along with being a major marketer of apples, grapefruit, oranges, pears, plums, table grapes, other tropical and citrus fruits, dried fruits, canned fruits, fresh-cut flowers, and nuts. In recent years, Dole has added value-added products, such as packaged salad mixes, fresh vegetables, and novelty-canned pineapple shapes. As of 2004, Dole became one of the largest importers and marketers of fresh-cut flowers in the United States. The Dole brand, which was introduced in 1933, is one of the most recognized brands for fresh and packaged produce in the United States. In all, Dole sells or sources over 200 products in more than 90 countries around the world. In 1851, Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke established in Hawaii the company that eventually became Dole Food Company, Inc. Cooke and Castle set up business to sell wholesale goods, and in 1858 the pair entered the food business, investing in Hawaii's sugar industry. The business continued to grow, and in 1894 the company was incorporated as Castle & Cooke Co., Inc. A few years later, James Drummond Dole, a 21-year-old graduate of Harvard, arrived in Hawaii. With degrees in business and horticulture and a keen interest in farming, Dole hoped to make a living by growing the exotic pineapple. His cousin, Sanford B. Dole, an influential politician who became governor of the newly acquired territory of Hawaii, encouraged James's ambition to market pineapple commercially. By 1901 James Dole had acquired 60 acres of land 18 miles north of Honolulu, in Wahiawa, and had formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. His groves of smooth Cayenne pineapples were ready to be harvested two years later. Rather than trying to export the fresh fruit, Dole decided to market his pineapple in cans. He established a cannery near the pineapple groves, which allowed him to achieve the best results by canning soon after the ripened produce was harvested. The Hawaiian Pineapple Company packaged and marketed nearly 2,000 cases of canned pineapple in 1903. In 1911 engineer Henry Ginaca, an employee of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, invented a machine capable of processing 100 pineapple cylinders a minute. Such production facilities enabled the company to market its produce across a large portion of the United States. Developing a successful marketing strategy became a high priority for the company during this time, particularly important if Dole was to attain his goal of making pineapple available throughout the country. Together with several smaller companies that were also involved in the processing of pineapple, Dole financed an advertising blitz in magazines and newspapers on the mainland, promoting canned pineapple products under exotic, foreign brand names such as Ukelele and Outrigger. As a result, demand increased significantly. Toward the end of World War I, in 1918, Dole's Hawaiian Pineapple Company was producing one million cases annually and had gained a reputation as the largest processor of pineapples in the world. During this time Dole purchased more land in order to expand his business and in 1922 purchased the island of Lanai for a pineapple plantation. To finance the purchase, Dole sold a third interest in his company to Waialua Agricultural Company, which was a division of Castle & Cooke. By the mid-1920s Castle & Cooke had evolved into a Hawaiian