Each year, the beginning of harvest coincides with the end of the fiscal year for Tree Top, and while we’re all focused on what’s ahead, it's also a good time to reflect on the year just ended. For Tree Top, fiscal year 2006 was somewhat similar to fiscal year 2005, especially with regard to the abundance of our crops.

With the guidance of your Board of Directors, Tree Top again worked its way through a number of challenges—another abundant crop, significant line and facilities changes, increasing energy costs, and the re-branding effort—and ended the year on a profitable note, for the 14th consecutive time! Your return is $11.05 per ton over commercial market value and all member profits will be paid in cash.

While we would have liked to see higher profits from this last year, I think we understand the reality of our industry and the challenges our cooperative deals with daily—increasing competition, rising energy costs, the never-ending focus on improving efficiencies, and crop fluctuations. It’s through the efforts of Tree Top’s 1,000+ employees that it’s possible for us to earn a profit on our culls and downgraded fruit. In fact, in conversations with other growers, I often hear it said: We’re fortunate Tree Top is here because not every piece of fruit we grow is fresh-market quality; I agree 100%!

Throughout its more than 45-year history, Tree Top has worked hard at taking to market a variety of innovative products, based on our fruit, to meet customer demand. This last year was no exception. Your cooperative introduced a number of juice blends, based on apple and pear concentrate, as well as several new flavors of apple sauce, and provided a variety of new products for its ingredient customers.