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 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.

Cuties citrus