Mandarin season by country

Roughly June to September, filling the gap when Northern Hemisphere citrus is out of season. Peru has moved steadily towards easy-peeler varieties for European retail.

Citrus into the EU is closely inspected, so build the phytosanitary hold into the plan rather than treating it as an exception — the days it costs come off the shelf life the voyage preserved.

Roughly June to September, overlapping Peru’s window almost exactly. Between the two origins, Southern Hemisphere easy-peelers cover the whole Northern Hemisphere summer.

Chile’s citrus goes disproportionately to the United States, so European availability in any given year depends on where the exporters found the better price rather than on the harvest.

Roughly April to September out of Entre Ríos and Corrientes, alongside the lemon programme and often through the same ports.

Argentine easy-peelers compete directly with Peruvian and South African fruit in the same months, and a good share goes to Russia and to Eastern Europe rather than to the EU. What reaches Rotterdam in a given year depends on where the exporters found the better price.

Roughly March to September. South African easy-peelers have grown faster than any other part of its citrus basket, driven by European retail moving away from loose oranges.

They ship at the front of the citrus season, ahead of the Valencia volume, which means they are on the water in the weeks before the worst of the port congestion rather than during it.

Roughly September to March. Moroccan easy-peelers are now a fixture of the European autumn, and Nadorcott in particular is the late variety that carries the season into the new year.

Morocco and Spain are direct competitors in these months, and the two together are the reason Southern Hemisphere mandarins have no market until about April. Reading the Peruvian and South African windows without this one explains nothing.

Roughly September to March, out of Valencia and Castellón. Spain is the reference point for the entire global easy-peeler trade: when Spanish clementines are on the shelf, no Southern Hemisphere programme has a market.

Clemenules opens the season, Nadorcott and Or carry it past the new year. Almost all of it reaches Northern Europe by truck within a day or two, which is a standard no importer can match on fruit that crossed an ocean.

Roughly April to October, opening with Imperials and finishing with the late Murcotts and Afourers. It runs a few weeks ahead of the Navel window and overlaps it in the middle, so an Australian citrus programme is usually both fruits on one booking.

Easy-peelers are the part of the Australian citrus trade most exposed to how the fruit is handled after discharge: they are thinner-skinned than a Navel, they are sold on appearance, and a container that waits at a congested terminal in Hong Kong loses condition faster than the oranges beside it.

Roughly November to January, out of Hunan, Jiangxi and Guangxi. The window lands on the Northern Hemisphere winter alongside Spain and Morocco, but the volume goes to Southeast Asia and Russia rather than west.

That is worth knowing when a European easy-peeler is being offered into an Asian market in December. The comparison the buyer is making is against fruit that travelled a week, not five, and the price on this row is what a Spanish or Moroccan programme has to answer.

Satsumas from about October, Nova and W. Murcott from November into February. The volume goes to Russia, Eastern Europe and the Gulf rather than west, where Spain and Morocco already hold the shelf.

For a European buyer that makes this a competitive calendar rather than a sourcing one. Turkish fruit that cannot go to its usual market — a closed border, a currency move — still arrives somewhere, and the somewhere is usually a market a Moroccan or Egyptian programme had been priced into.

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.