With Christmas coming up and the Mediterranean citrus season in full swing, here is a party game which category managers and retailers can play, which to my mind also poses a few questions.

Consumers understand the term easy peelers for seedless and seeded fruit, although the trade term soft citrus is probably less well understood.

So far so good.

Easy peelers covers not just satsumas and clementines which are mandarin hybrids, but also tangerines - a widely used term which owes its origins to the US and which confusingly, are also mandarins.

But there are also some varieties where the easy-peeler description hardly fits.

I am thinking about Ortanique, one of the first trade-marked fruits. It is originally from Jamaica and was so successful it led to a host of clones identified today as Mandora in Cyprus, Topaz in Israel, Tambor in South Africa and Ortaline in Morocco. This does not even take into account numerous other hybrids such as Tangor and Tangelo.

Then there are others such as Minneola, which can at least be easily recognised by what the trade has always affectionately called a “sheep’s nose” at one end of the fruit, but it does not have the kind of skin that comes off as easily as other types of easy peelers.

Back to the main point of recognition however. On the shelf, the situation is further complicated by the fact that the public are familiar with satsumas - once a traditional stocking-filler - which are actually mandarins.

Some 20 years ago - these were the most popular soft citrus in the UK category despite early picked fruit having to be de-greened and even sold slightly sour.

This is probably a throwback to the old wholesale market days when, being the first to arrive, they made a premium.

If common sense and improved variety breeding has made this a thing of the past, consumer tastes have also switched to clementines.

The French, incidentally, have been saying clementines taste better for as long as I can remember and once even tried to export their own Corsican crop across the Channel to tempt the UK market.

Recognition, therefore, for shoppers when they make their choice from the retail shelf becomes a bit of a quagmire.

Surely there needs to be some simpler form of classification. Years ago the Citrus Marketing Board of Israel made an attempt to style all the various varieties grown in the Promised Land simply as Jaffarines.

Even one of the gurus of the industry Jim Saunt, ex-Outspan and Sinclair International, whose reference work I am indebted to, made the suggestion five years ago that identity would be easier if all mandarins were called thus prefixed by their specific names for greater clarification.

However, I am still not sure whether this would simply serve to confuse bewildered consumers even further.

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