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Paramount Citrus building new mandarin orange packing plant

Bakersfield.com – February 14, 2011

Paramount Citrus next year will open a 600,000-square-foot packing house for small mandarin oranges. The plant will create 500 jobs in Delano.

Paramount Citrus sells the fruit under the brand name California Cuties, a partnership with Los Angeles-based Sun Pacific and Fresno-based Fowler Packing. Cuties are a hybrid fruit, a cross between a sweet orange and a Chinese mandarin.

The brand’s clementine mandarins are harvested from mid-October through April, and murcott mandarins are harvested from mid-January through April. Both are sold in either 3- or 5-pound bags.

Paramount broke ground in November and will be doing construction in phases with an opening planned for next fall, said Eric Johnson, vice president of capital projects for Paramount parent company Roll Global, LLC.

The plant will sort and otherwise process the fruit prior to bagging it and sending it off to market. The facility will be next to an existing packing house Paramount already operates at 1901 S. Lexington St. in Delano to process lemons and oranges.

The existing plant is open almost year-round, but the new plant will only operate six months a year.

The ramping up of capacity for Cuties is a response to explosive growth in the market for the fruit, Johnson said.

“They’re smaller and sweeter than oranges and much easier to peel, which makes them perfect for kids,” he said. “Parents love them because they’re a small, healthy snack and you don’t need to have a sharp knife to take them apart.”

Planting in California has more than doubled from 15,960 acres in 2002 to 38,826 acres last year, and it’s expected to double again over the next five years, said Joel Nelson, president of the trade group California Citrus Mutual.

The majority are sold domestically, he said.

Maribel Reyna, economic development and redevelopment director for the city of Delano, declined to comment.

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