New Florida Tangerines

New Florida tangerines have consumer a-peel (

The Ledger(09/29/2015)

The “Fast Track” program for developing new fresh citrus fruit varieties is beginning to live up to its name. Florida growers by October 2016 will get about 100,000 trees of two new tangerine varieties that are seedless and easy to peel, said Peter Chaires, executive director of the Maitland-based New Varieties Development and Management Corp., which promotes the research and acquisition of new fresh citrus fruits.

Those are the qualities most sought-after by today’s on-the-go consumers, he added.

“They pass the banana test – you can drive along and eat them and won’t get messy,” Chaires said.

The two new tangerines – identified as “7-6-27” and the more ear-catching “UFGlow” – will be the first new varieties to make the second tier of the three-stage development process under the Fast Track program, which the corporation began in 2012. Fast Track has a total of 16 new fresh citrus varieties in development.

For growers, the most significant benefit of the second tier is that they can sell the fruit in the U.S. market, Chaires said. The other 14 new varieties in the Fast Track program are in the first tier — the trial phase with a smaller number of trees for each variety and a prohibition on selling the fruit.

After the second-tier stage, which lasts for five years, 7-6-27 and UFGlow will go into the third tier, or open commercialization, when the trees will become available to any grower who wants to buy them from a nursery, he said. That means growers participating in the second tier get a five-year head start on producing the new fruit for the market.

Lower royalty fees is the other benefit for Fast Track growers, Chaires said. For agreeing to set aside acreage for field testing the new varieties, growers will pay a royalty fee of $1.70 per tree on all future purchases, a 38 percent discount on the $2.75 fee charged to other growers.

Of course, the future demand for the new tangerine trees depends on how well they perform during the second-tier trial, he said.

“If they don’t perform well, nobody will want to sign up for them,” Chaires said.

But the tangerine varieties look promising so far, he added.

Florida fresh citrus growers created the New Varieties Corp. in 2006 because the state’s most widely grown tangerines, Fallglo and Honey, were losing favor among U.S. consumers to seedless, easy-to-peel varieties, such as the Spanish Clementine and its California cousin, the Cutie. The Mediterranean Clementine tangerine does not grow well in Florida’s semi-tropical climate, so new varieties had to be bred.

Florida growers produced about 10 million boxes of tangerines and tangelos in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the tangerine harvest fell to 2.3 million boxes in 2014-15 because of tree losses to the fatal bacterial disease citrus greening. More than 70 percent of tangerines are sold on the fresh market.

The big, unanswered question is how well 7-6-27 and UFGlow tangerines will tolerate greening, Chaires acknowledged.

A single 7-6-27 tangerine tree has grown well during its field trial in a heavily infected area, he said, “but we don’t know why.” There’s less data on how UFGlow trees will respond to greening.

“It’s important for the industry to keep up with what the consumer wants,” said Mike Sparks, chief executive of Lakeland-based Florida Citrus Mutual, the growers’ trade group. “We need new varieties that are easier to peel, have fewer seeds and mature earlier in the season. Everything has to be consumer driven and that’s why this program is crucial to the future of the fresh industry.