Collection: Original Antique & Vintage Fruit Crate Labels

In the decades before mass refrigeration and national trucking transformed American food distribution, California's fruit industry shipped its harvest in wooden crates — each one wrapped in a label that was as much marketing as packaging. 🍎 Original Antique & Vintage Fruit Crate Labels is the dedicated archive of these chromolithographic masterworks, covering citrus, apples, pears, cherries, and stone fruits from California's label golden age.

The collection includes original Sunkist citrus labels from the Royal Knight, Victoria, Lincoln, and Victoria Avenue brand lines of the 1920s through 1940s, independent orange and lemon label designs from Riverside County and Santa Barbara County growers, apple and pear labels from Pacific Northwest orchards, McCurdy labels featuring Lick Observatory imagery from the Santa Clara Valley, Channel Islands lemon labels from Santa Barbara, and a wide range of decorative produce labels from regional California packers. Most were printed by Los Angeles and San Francisco lithography houses before offset printing ended the tradition in the 1950s. 🌳

These labels were designed to be discarded — which is exactly what makes surviving NOS examples so valuable today. All items are original printed labels. Zero reproductions. Frameable and displayable in original condition.