This commodity is usually available for the retail market from Oct. In its monthly citrus forecast reports, the USDA lumps tangerines, tangelos and mandarins into one commodity group, focusing on California and Florida, the states producing commercial volumes. Often, grocery stores will label both satsumas and clementines as a clementine.

The skin is easy to peel and sweet with a thinner skin that holds tighter to the fruit than with satsumas. For a while, they were included in children’s Christmas stockings. Most canned mandarins are actually canned satsumas.Īlso smaller than tangerines, clementines shine during December holidays. Their sweet, typically seedless fruit is what makes them popular, but they are also often praised for their hardiness under the canning process, according to the Ontario marketing association. Satsumas are smaller than tangerines, like clementines. These guys are really distinctive, with loose, bumpy skin and a knobby neck that keeps them from being as spherical as the others. Tangerines typically have a few seeds in each fruit and are sometimes sold in supermarkets with some leaves attached. Make sense? They have a slightly deeper red hue and are distinctly larger than satsumas or clementines, but are still smaller than what we normally call an orange.

People often use the name “tangerine” and “mandarin” interchangeably, but not all mandarins are tangerines, while all tangerines are mandarins.

Tangerines and clementines