They are in all the fruit and vegetable sections of supermarkets at the moment. The clementines arrived at the beginning of November and will be present until January. You can find them at all prices, but be careful, the quality is not always there.
It's clementine season. Present on the shelves since the beginning of November, they will be on our tables until January. And despite their short season, they are one of the most consumed fruits in France. We eat 4.2 kg per year per person.
But on the shelves, prices can go from single to double depending on the origin and quality. To choose them correctly, you must pay attention to both the labeling that accompanies them and their appearance. RMC Conso explains.
Favor French origin
Origin is one of the first criteria for choosing French people when it comes to fruits and vegetables, along with quality. Choosing local fruits and vegetables not only ensures a certain freshness but also supports agricultural sovereignty.
If you want to buy French clementines, look for information on the origin: it is necessarily indicated for fresh fruits and vegetables. Almost all French clementines come from a single region: Corsica. Its temperate climate between sea and mountains offers ideal conditions for their production.
Reading the signs and labels will give you a second very important piece of information: have the clementines undergone post-harvest treatment? This statement is mandatory for citrus fruits.
These often involve fungicide treatments, to prevent the development of bacteria and mold on the fruit and ensure longer conservation. Some of these treatments, which are toxic, are prohibited for use in France but used in Spain and authorized on imported fruits.
If you choose clementines from Corsica, there is no risk: post-harvest treatments are not authorized for them.
Quality visual cues
Be careful, however, of possible fraud at the origin. To be sure to buy clementines from Corsica, several visual clues can help you.
“Our clementines must have kept their leaves very green, this is a sign of freshness. We harvest them on Monday, they are sorted on Tuesday, and on Thursday they are on the shelves,” explains Vincent Marcadal, producer of clementines from Corsica contacted by RMC Conso.
No more than three or four days pass between harvest and placement on the shelves.
It has what we call a “little green ass”: it refers to the presence of green at the apex of the fruit. This does not mean that it is not ripe, on the contrary. This color is generally still present at the start of the season, due to the mildness of the nights (clementines take on a completely orange color when there is a strong difference in temperature between day and night).
The Corsican clementine has no seeds, nor any clementine for that matter. It is in fact a fruit resulting from a cross between the mandarin and the orange. It is therefore “sterile”, and does not produce seeds.
Twice as expensive
What also distinguishes the Corsican clementine from its cousin from Spain or Morocco is obviously its price. Around four or five euros per kilo, it is twice as expensive. This can be explained by three reasons.
The first is its scarcity: production only covers 15% of our consumption. The rest comes mainly from Spain (75%) and to a lesser extent from Morocco.
But everything that is rare is expensive. Why such a rarity? Because their quality does not allow returns as high as abroad.
The production of Corsican clementines is in fact governed by a set of rules listed in specifications, which enabled it to obtain an IGP (Protected Geographical Indication) label.
Requested at the initiative of producers in order to maintain the excellence of their fruits, this IGP obtained in 2007 requires them to carry out meticulous work in terms of production and harvest.
To be marketed, clementines must have a certain level of acidity (neither too low nor too high), a very specific sugar level, they must be harvested by hand, when ripe, from the tree, with its leaf , etc.
“These elitist specifications allow us to obtain a valued product. We do not pick if we are above 1.6 acidity, for example,” explains the producer.
“This is also why we cannot make it a mass consumer product, its cost is too high.”
Higher production costs
This actually results in the third reason, which explains its price: production costs, which are much higher than abroad. Chief among these costs is labor. The minimum wage is higher in France than in Spain and Morocco, and it takes many more men and women to harvest clementines by hand than by mechanization.
“For us, one stroke of pruning shears is one clementine harvested. So imagine how many it takes to harvest the 37,000 tonnes that we are planning for this season,” explains Vincent Marcadal.
And since the fruits are only picked when ripe on the tree, the harvest requires three different passes, spaced several weeks apart.
Conversely, imported fruits are picked at once, making it impossible for all the clementines to fully ripen. To overcome this problem, greening is carried out: a gas, called ethylene, is diffused on the fruits and helps accelerate their ripening and coloring.
Although the process is not toxic, it is much less natural and modifies the organoleptic qualities of the clementines.
