![]() ![]() With much more Central Valley acreage to play with, they started planting vast clementine groves in 1997, followed shortly afterward by W. Two large corporate-style citrus firms, Sun-Pacific and Paramount Citrus, joined forces and emulated the Mulholland strategy. Mulholland had proven that “brand loyalty” – the American consumers’ tendency to swear allegiance to a corporate logo – worked even with a natural product such as fruit, and even when you switched fruits. It’s not clear whether most customers even noticed that the contents of the box changed from month to month. Ripe tangerines hanging heavy on the tree. Immediately customers began snapping up the easy-to-eat (and pronounce) “Delites.” So he planted more acres, and then extended the growing season by planting other seedless mandarin varieties which he also called “Delites,” eventually making the brand a reliable year-round product. Mulholland trademarked the brand name “Delite” and bestowed it on his crops. Murcott Afourer” – a marketer’s nightmare. But there was one problem: The tastebud-friendly fruit already had an ungainly official name “W. So he fatefully decided to devote his entire farm to this new miracle citrus. He learned to his amazement that the variety was grown only in Morocco, but would soon become available in California. Mullholland is a Central Valley citrus farmer who in the early ’90s stumbled across an outlandishly sweet type of easy-to-peel tangerine that was nonetheless seedless – the holy grail for tangerine growers. “The concept of ‘branding’ tangerines was pioneered by Tom Mullholland,” says Ayala. An acre of seedless mandarins is now much more profitable than an acre of any other citrus.īut dethroning Big Orange took something more: an awareness of how customers behave. So tangerine growers gave shoppers what they wanted: New seedless varieties have created a 21st-century tangerine gold rush. ![]() ![]() It’s pure economics: A 2005 study revealed that customers would be willing to pay up to four times as much for a seedless tangerine as they would for one of the old-fashioned seedy varieties. ![]() It’s not that farmers have an eccentric personal phobia of seeds. Citrus researchers have been hard at work for decades in a quest for seedlessness. The natural plethora of seeds in most varieties made tangerines more problematic than the seedless and effortless navel orange. So tangerine growers gave shoppers what they wanted: new seedless varieties have created a 21st-century tangerine gold rush. It took concerted marketing campaigns from business-savvy citrus farmers who brought a new idea to the world of tangerines: product branding.įor over a century in the U.S., tangerines were mostly ignored, seen merely as smaller, seedier cousins to the ubiquitous orange. This preference cascade toward tangerines didn’t happen by accident. That’s an astonishingly swift reversal of fortunes in the nation’s leading tangerine-growing state. Between 20, tangerine groves in California skyrocketed from 8,800 acres to 38,000 acres, while over the same timespan orange groves slipped from 199,000 acres down to 177,000. “But these days people are tired of oranges. Oranges were dominant in the 20th century.” More segments passed around. “Customers mostly wanted oranges instead. But it was just a niche market in those days,” she explains. “My grandfather started growing tangerines here back in the ’20s. ![]()
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