Origin comparison
Clementine from Spain or from Morocco
Check what you are comparing. The USDA report from Rabat does not separate clementine at all: Morocco is counted as tangerines and mandarins together, and industry there told the attaché that sizes 4 and 5 were the ones available for export in 2025/26. Our Clemenules is a single named cultivar, it normally packs smaller, and it is finished by the end of January.
Side by side
| What you are comparing | Clementina Clemenules | Moroccan tangerine and mandarin |
|---|---|---|
| Window the origin publishes | November – January | Marketing year September to August; in 2025/26 exports did not open until the second week of November |
| How the origin is reported | Clementine | Reported as tangerines and mandarins together; the balance sheet has no clementine line |
| Sizes the origin states | 3, 4 | 4 and 5 reported as more available for export in 2025/26 |
| Where the crop is sold | Table | Fresh only; the balance sheet shows nothing going to processing |
Figures for varieties we do not grow come from: Moroccan tangerine and mandarin: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Morocco Citrus Annual, report MO2025-0021, December 2025
Which one to order, and when
Your specification says clementine and means it
A named cultivar, from either country
The Moroccan figures here describe a whole class of fruit. That is a limit of the statistics and not of the orchards, and a Moroccan packer can name a cultivar as readily as we can. What it means is that the published data will not do the checking for you.
You need mandarin on the shelf after January
Morocco
Our clementine is finished at the end of January and nothing we grow replaces it. Report MO2024-0017 from the same post credits the country's rising production to new Nadorcott and Afourer plantings coming into full bearing, and those are the late varieties that carry the category into spring.
Your line is built on a smaller clementine
Us, for the weeks we have
The size rows do not line up. Southern Moroccan packinghouses reported sizes 4 and 5 as the ones available that season, and what our grower normally packs sits a step below. A shopper used to one fruit in the hand notices the other.
What this comparison does not settle
- The Moroccan column is one attaché report for one season, and much of it is a forecast. A projection of a country's exports says nothing about what a given packinghouse can load in a given week.
- The size observation is weaker than it sounds. It came from packinghouses in the south of the country in a season with late autumn rain, and size moves with the weather every year on both sides of this table.
- Neither column carries a measured sugar or acid figure, which on fruit bought to be eaten by the piece is the row a buyer wants most. Ours are unmeasured and the Rabat report does not carry them.
- What we can put against Morocco is small. The report projects national exports for the category in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes; our clementine is one planting. This page compares fruit, not capacity.
A cultivar against a category
The row doing the work above is the one about reporting. Our column names a cultivar. The Moroccan column names a class, because the balance sheet those figures come from carries a single line for tangerines and mandarins and no line for clementine. That is a property of the statistics rather than of the orchards, and Morocco grows clementine in quantity. It does mean that a buyer who wants clementine specifically cannot settle the question from published numbers, on either shore.
The practical version fits in a sentence. Ask a Moroccan supplier for the cultivar by name and get it in writing, exactly as you would ask us. A clementine and a late mandarin peel differently, hold differently and look different in a display, and the word mandarin on an offer covers all of them. Our sizes page explains how a code is written so a warehouse can check it on arrival, and a cultivar name deserves the same treatment on the same line.
Where Morocco wins, and it is not close
Our clementine ends in January. Report MO2024-0017, published from the same post a year before this one, puts Morocco's rising production down to new Nadorcott and Afourer plantings reaching full bearing, and those are the late varieties that keep the category on a shelf once the early clementines have gone. If a listing has to survive the spring, that is not a gap anything we grow can fill, and the harvest calendar shows precisely where our own year stops.
Scale points the same way. The Rabat report projects national exports for the category at a level no single planting belongs beside, and it names the European Union as one of the two primary destinations. A buyer who needs continuity and volume out of one origin is describing Morocco. A buyer who needs a named block of trees and a short conversation is describing something else, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are before either of us spends a morning on it.
The size row is the one to read twice
Size is where this comparison turns into an order, and the row above rewards a second reading. The codes recorded against each column sit a step apart: theirs came from packinghouses in the south of Morocco describing what was coming off the line after a wet autumn, ours are what our grower normally packs. Neither is better than the other. They are different fruit in the hand, and a shopper used to one will notice the other.
That row is also the least stable thing on this page. Size is decided by weather and by crop load, and the Moroccan observation belongs to one season with late rain behind it. Ours carries the same warning: what a block actually fills in a given week is a question for that week, and nobody can answer it in September. Give us the size you have to hold and the weeks, and we will say which of them we can meet, including when the answer is none of them.
The other decisions a buyer makes before ordering
Talk to the grower
Tell us the variety, the sizes and the delivery week you need. You get a delivered price and what we can commit to in writing, from the person who picks the fruit.
The grower handles enquiries. Response times are still to be confirmed.