Israel fresh produce export calendar

Roughly January to April. Orri is a late, seedless, easy-peeling variety grown under licence, and it is one of the few pieces of fruit European supermarkets sell under its own name rather than under the retailer’s — which is the whole commercial logic of the window.

Being late is the point. Orri arrives after the Spanish and Moroccan clementine programmes have finished, into weeks when the easy-peeler shelf would otherwise be thin, and it is priced as a speciality rather than against them.

Roughly October to April out of the coastal plain. Two products share the row: red Star Ruby, which competes with Florida and South Africa, and the Sweetie — a pomelo-grapefruit cross, green-skinned and low in acid — which competes with nothing because almost nobody else grows it.

Grapefruit is among the more forgiving citrus in a container, but the Sweetie is sold on a skin colour that buyers have to be taught to read: it looks unripe and is not. That is a merchandising problem at the far end rather than a shipping one, and it is worth knowing before the first pallet lands.

Harvest through the late summer and early autumn in the Jordan Valley and the Arava, with the heaviest shipping from September into the new year. The fruit is held chilled or frozen after that, so what the band below shows is when volume moves rather than when it exists.

The demand side is what makes this window unlike anything else in this section. Ramadan accounts for a large share of world date consumption and it moves about eleven days earlier each year, so the weeks the trade wants the fruit walk backwards through the calendar. Planning off last season’s dates puts a programme a fortnight late before a booking is made.