Vintage 1970s+ Crate Label 🍇 Elkhorn Fruit Co Lodi CA Zinfandel Juice Grapes For Sale

Size: 13 x 4 inches

An original, unused fruit crate label printed for the Elkhorn Fruit Co. ofLodi, California — Growers, Packers & Shippers — with Leonardini & Sonnamed alongside them. It advertises Zinfandel juice grapes, the varietal Lodi built its reputation on.

• The company's own orange triangular EFC trademark sits in the upper corner.
• Net Weight 36 lbs. is printed beside Poids Net 16.3 KG, and“Produce of U.S.A.” beside “Produit des États-Unis”. The bilingualEnglish/French wording and the metric weight mean this was printed for export —most likely north into Quebec, where French labelling became expected through the 1960s.
• The main office address carries a five-digit ZIP code. ZIP codes did not existanywhere in the United States before 1963, so this printing is 1963 or later —a checkable date that comes from the label itself rather than from guesswork.

New Old Stock. Never applied to a crate, never trimmed, never pasted. Brightlithographed colour, clean edges. Stored flat since the day it was printed.

Before barcodes and refrigerated trucks, a wooden crate of California grapes had one chance tocatch a buyer's eye as it came off the rail car — and the label was it. Growers commissionedserious commercial artists and printed in bold stone lithography. When cardboard cartons replacedwooden crates in the 1960s, warehouses full of unused labels were left behind. That is why sheetslike this one survive unused, and why they are collected today as commercial art.

Ships flat and protected. From a long-running family collection of American advertising ephemera.