“You judge a Mozart symphony by how loudly it’s played?” asks Karp. Where a satsuma might be a 12 on the Brix sweetness scale, a Shiranui can be up to 18. They are spectacular, seedless, gargantuan, startlingly sweet. “The loved child,” Karp informs me, “has many names, and that’s never been more true than with Shiranui.” Other Shiranui growers have entered the market – Trinity Fruit Company calls them Big Honey, for example – but Sumo has become the default name for the bumpy orange with the top knot in the US. In the last few years they have become even more widely available, now under the mantel of AC Brands. In Japan, they have been marketed since the late 90s under the trade name Dekopon – “pon” for ponkan, and “deko” meaning “bump”, in reference to the fruit’s distinctive shape – but didn’t make their US debut until 2011, when Suntreat Growers & Shippers started marketing the fruit as Sumo Citrus. Shiranui, as the fruit is called, are a Japanese invention, an extraordinarily sweet hybrid of mandarin and orange, explains David Karp, a citrus researcher with the University of California, Riverside and noted “fruit detective”. The Sumo moment has been a long time coming. “She said the first time she had them was at Whole Foods, and people were grabbing them off the shelves like they were free alcohol,” Venter says. Venter did not include audio in her clip, out of respect (“I don’t know her!”), but she walks me through the evangelist’s key talking points: Sumos are easy to peel, extremely juicy very large and extremely in-demand. There are a number of reasons the clip works: because of the music it was paired with (Hello, Hello, Elton John featuring Lady Gaga) because Trader Joe’s is social media catnip because it was a perfect only-in-New-York moment. ![]() ![]() TikTok may be a hotbed of weird food trends, but “I’ve never seen it specifically with a fruit before,” she adds. “There are so many other videos, ‘Now I’m going to buy Sumo oranges because the woman at the 72nd Street Trader Joe’s convinced me!’” says Venter.
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