Indian River Citrus Gift Fruit and Packinghouses in Vero Beach, Florida

Indian River fruit leaves the Vero Beach area two ways: packinghouses ship it by the carton to wholesale and export markets, and gift fruit shippers mail boxes directly to households.

The Indian River Citrus League describes the Indian River Citrus District as a narrow strip on Florida's east coast stretching 200 miles from the Daytona Beach area to West Palm Beach, across six counties including Indian River County. Its history page says the district raises 70% of the grapefruit grown in Florida and that three out of every four grapefruit that leave the state fresh come from the district.

The League keeps separate lists for the two trades. Its gift fruit shipper list names Al's Family Farms, Countryside Citrus and Hale Groves, and its packinghouse list names Egan Fruit Packing and Riverfront Groves. For the Vero Beach area, Hale Groves shows how a gift fruit business grew from a roadside stand into a national mail order company.

Hale Groves began as a roadside fruit stand that Steve and Polly Hale opened in Indian River County in the fall of 1947, and it grew into a mail order gift fruit company.

A company history published by Hale Groves says Stephen C. Hale Jr. wanted to be in the mail order business from the start. Working from home in Indian River County, he sent postcards to friends, relatives and roadside customers offering to ship the same fruit, and that first mailing list eventually grew to millions of names. He packed the fruit in a shed behind the house and trucked it to the Railway Express Station, while Polly took the orders and the couple raised four children. The same history gives his dates as 1919 to 2005 and says he died at 86.

The company's retail store page is headed Hale Store Closed. It says the business started in 1947 with a small roadside stand in Indian River County and that Hale Groves today is the largest Florida gift fruit shipper, sending more than half a million gift packages each year, a claim the company makes about itself. The page does not give a closing date for the store.

The store site is becoming public land. An Indian River County notice dated December 26, 2025 says voters approved a $50 million Environmental Bond Referendum in 2022 and that the Board of County Commissioners has approved sale agreements for Hale Groves, 21.89 acres at 9250 U.S. Highway 1, Sebastian, and Durrance Place, 11.74 acres at 9455 U.S. Highway 1, with panel field reviews at the Hale Groves parking lot on January 6, 2026. An earlier county hearing notice for October 7, 2025 listed the parcels differently: a Hale Grove property of about 18.37 acres, a Hale Grove storefront property of about 4.9 acres and a Durrance Place property of about 12.08 acres. The county notices reviewed do not state a closing date or price.

The Indian River Citrus League's packinghouse page lists two member packinghouses, Egan Fruit Packing in Fellsmere and Riverfront Groves in Vero Beach.

The League list gives Egan Fruit Packing at 7735 County Road 512, Fellsmere, and Riverfront Groves, Inc. at P.O. Box 1148, Vero Beach, 772-562-4155, and says these packinghouses ship Indian River grapefruit to consumers in 24 countries around the world. The League's undated history page gives larger and slightly different figures for the whole district: 21 packinghouses, numerous gift fruit shippers and several processing plants, with Indian River citrus shipped to 23 countries. The two League pages are stated here as written.

Older packing buildings still stand in the county. Visit Indian River County, the county tourism site, describes Peterson Groves, a mile from the Indian River Mall, as having one of the oldest citrus packing houses in the county among its farm buildings, on property the Peterson family first settled more than 100 years ago.

IMG Citrus, Riverfront Groves, Countryside Citrus, Hale Groves and several family farm stores still grow, pack, ship or sell Indian River fruit around Vero Beach.

IMG Citrus says it began in 1979, when founders Michel and Veronique Sallin started marketing Florida grapefruit in Western Europe with 10,000 cartons in their first year. The company says it became a fully integrated citrus company that grows, packs and markets fresh citrus when it acquired a packinghouse in Vero Beach in 1999, and that in 2023 it acquired a 185,000 square foot cold storage and packaging facility, along with 1,000 acres of farmland in Indian River County.

The gift and farm store side survives on a smaller scale. Visit Indian River County describes Countryside Citrus as a third-generation family business with a farm store just south of Sebastian and a Vero Beach Ocean Drive location, and Schacht Groves as a third-generation family farm about five miles from downtown Vero Beach that began operating in the 1950s. The League's gift shipper list adds Al's Family Farms alongside Countryside Citrus and Hale Groves.

Vero Heritage, which runs the Heritage Center and Indian River Citrus Museum in downtown Vero Beach, is putting old citrus crate labels back on display as public signs.

Vero Heritage says it is establishing the Vero Heritage Citrus Label Tour, modeled on tours in Polk and Manatee counties, as an art in public places heritage tour of the artistic labels that once adorned wooden citrus shipping crates. As of summer 2022 it had three signs in historic downtown Vero Beach, with more planned around Indian River County, and it offers a family scavenger hunt. The Heritage Center is at 2140 14th Avenue, Vero Beach, 772-770-2263, and its gift shop sells original citrus crate labels.

The tour is part of a statewide set. The Florida Citrus Hall of Fame lists an Indian River County Citrus Label Tour alongside label tours in Lake, Polk and Manatee counties.

The Indian River name signaled a premium district for Vero Beach growers, and the League was organized in 1931 to protect it.

According to the Indian River Citrus League, early district citrus was carried by boat to northeastern markets, and by the 1920s growers elsewhere in Florida were describing their fruit as Indian River. In 1930 the Federal Trade Commission issued a cease and desist order against using the term on citrus not grown in the district, and the League was organized in 1931 and reorganized in 1948. The League also says Vero Beach is over 100 miles further east than Jacksonville, closer to the warm Gulf Stream, and that cold fronts are buffered by the rivers, swamps and lakes of central Florida before they reach the district.

Indian River County's groves have kept shrinking. The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service preliminary Commercial Citrus Inventory, released August 27, 2026, counts 6,135 acres of citrus in Indian River County in 2026, down from 8,627 acres in 2023, and statewide citrus acreage of 165,359 acres, down 21 percent from the previous survey.

Last verified: October 15, 2026, by re-checking the Indian River Citrus League's packinghouse, gift shipper and history pages, two Indian River County conservation notices, the USDA NASS August 2026 citrus inventory, the Hale Groves and IMG Citrus company pages, Vero Heritage, Visit Indian River County and the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame label tour page.