This June, social media users will be able to replace their #mangoemoji with a real mango emoji, thanks to Unicode, and the Australian mango industry.
With the release of 157 new emoji’s the mango will appear as a part of Unicode’s new update.
Australian mango grower-funded organisation, Hort Innovation, played a role in pushing for a mango to be included in the update by funding a social media campaign which was the basis of their proposal.
“I was very confident we would have a groundswell of fans begging for one across Australia, and potentially across the world, with our Asian and US export plans as well,” said Elisa King, acting marketing lead.
The social media campaign launched in September 2016 to align with the 2016/17 mango season and has since seen more than 800 posts using the campaign hashtag.
At the end of the season, based on that support, a proposal was made to the international Unicode Consortium (the worldwide authority on emojis) to introduce the mango emoji in their next official update.
“There are about 6 billion emojis sent on a daily basis and with so many fruit emojis, it is about time one of Australia’s favourite fruit has its own one.”
