Workware

Founded in the early 1920s, Corona Clipper, Inc. is a leader in the marketing and manufacturing of professional and consumer tools for the lawn and garden, landscape, irrigation, construction and agriculture markets. With a retail and distribution network that extends throughout the world, Corona's proven designs, quality manufacturing processes and unparalleled customer service make it the best choice in tools for contractors, agricultural professionals and avid gardeners alike.

In January 2000 Corona was acquired by Corporación Patricio Echeverria, a Spanish hand tool manufacturer and is now a division of this corporation.

Corona's history is tied to the first product we manufactured, the AG 5050 Orange Sheer, which we still make today. This tool was formerly called, and still remembered by many, as the "9B Orange Clipper". The 9B Orange Clipper is linked directly with the U.S. citrus industry, which started near Corona in the city of Riverside.

In 1873, the National Arboretum in Washington, DC sent two small Bahia navel orange trees gathered by missionaries in Brazil, to Riverside resident Eliza Tibbets. The orange trees loved the local environment and the local people loved the fruit, so it was a good match. The agricultural industry was thus born in Southern California, and the second "gold rush" was on. As production grew, citrus growers established marketing organizations designed to sell even more fruit but those sales were limited by how long it took fruit to get to market and remain in good condition. The search was on to figure out how to cut spoilage in transit.

The solution came in 1877 when railroad box cars, packed with ice to keep the fruit cool, headed to points east. This was an expensive process as the "ice" refrigerator cars needed to be re-iced on a regular basis. The ice cars opened more markets for the California orange. By 1882, more than one and a half million citrus trees had been planted in California, and other parts of the world started to show an interest in buying the fruit. The question was how could you get large quantities of fruit to the East Coast markets and Europe when you were still fighting decay in transit and icing down refrigerator cars? Transit to the East Coast by rail was taking 15 days and the fruit condition on arrival was marginal, so finding ways to cut decay and speed transit time were a priority.

The answers came from a big excavation and a little local research. On July 12, 1920, the Panama Canal opened. You could now ship to the East Coast by ship in about the same amount of time as by rail. However, because railroads had to continue stopping to add ice to the cars, ship transit to the East Coast had an advantage with freight rates. The first citrus shipment was made through the Panama Canal in 1921 and, later in that same year, the first shipment (by ship and through the Panama Canal) was made to London. The world market had just opened for the California Citrus Industry. Ships were now competing for the same freight business as trains, but the ocean transit and European market magnified the need for fruit to be handled without damage at the packing house and in the fields.

On the research end, citrus shippers had noticed that fruit that was "handled with care" in the fields and packing houses tended to produce better arrival conditions after an extended journey. Since better arrivals meant a better market price for the fruit, the growers and shippers started to develop methods of handling fruit to limit the damage to the fruit during the harvest and packing processes. One main contributor to decay was damage to the skin that could introduce bacteria and encourage mold growth.

The focus on field handling caught the interest of a school teacher in the Riverside area. He realized that much of the skin damage left on the oranges came from the oranges themselves. All of the fruit was harvested by hand; it was literally pulled off the tree. This resulted in openings in the skin if the fruit button (where the stem connects to the fruit) was pulled off in the process. The skin was also damaged in the field and in the packing houses, where the stems that remained on the fruit scratched and poked other fruit.

The school teacher had a vision, and that vision was the first moment of conception for Corona Clipper. He thought that if the fruit could be picked by a cutting tool, instead of being pulled, the fruit would retain its button. If the tool had a curved shape, it could cut the stem right at the button and eliminate stem fragments and the damage caused by the attached stems. Well, as the story goes, the teacher turned his idea into a hand tool that could do exactly what he had envisioned, but he was a school teacher, not an inventor and certainly not a tool maker. So, he turned over his idea to the local citrus community and made his contribution to the evolution of the citrus industry as a supplier to the world.

The tool still needed to be built, and that task fell to a blacksmith working in the back of one of the local citrus packing houses. A blacksmith could do the fine workmanship needed to develop such a small, precise and durable tool. The blacksmith's process not only forms metal, but the repeated heating and pounding yields a product that is significantly stronger than the steel in its original state. This process is called "forging" and these forged steel citrus harvesting sheers were the perfect solution to cut the orange spoilage problem. The blacksmith refined the design and became the supplier to the California citrus industry --- and Corona Clipper was born.

The timeline in that period remains a bit sketchy, but when Corona Clipper talks about the time "when we started," we usually say in the "early '1920's." That would make Corona Clipper over 80 years old today.