When branding something new, like a hybrid fruit, you want to go with something that is “approachable, easy to spell easy to ask for in a store,” said David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon Branding, which helps companies name products. “It’s this giant fruit” compared to a traditional mandarin, she said, with “that top knot, which is sort of like what a Sumo wrestler has in the ring.” “The Sumo Citrus brand was created because of … what the fruit looks like,” Sunnia Gull, director of brand management at AC Brands, told CNN Business. “No one was supposed to even breathe the word ‘Dekopon.'”īy 2011, the company was ready to make its secret public and to introduce the new fruit to Americans under a different name.ĪC Brands didn’t think that the name shiranui or Dekopon would make sense to US consumers. The growers involved “had signed confidentiality and exclusive marketing agreements with Suntreat,” Karp wrote. Eventually, Suntreat, which has since become AC Brands, was able to legally set up shiranui groves in California, an effort it undertook in secret. Some smuggled the product over and were forced to cut trees down by the government, which feared that they would spread harmful plant viruses in the country. Karp described a years-long effort by American growers to get their hands on the seedlings. By the 1990s, it had become a popular, beloved fruit in Japan, selling for as much as $10 a pop, the self-described “Fruit Detective” David Karp wrote in a 2011 Los Angeles Times article titled “ The Dekopon arrives in California.” Sumo Citrus is the brand name for a type of fruit called shiranui, which is commonly referred to as the Dekopon, itself a brand name, in its home country of Japan. US sales have jumped around 35% each year since March 2018, according to Nielsen data. Before the fruit hits the shelves for a period from January to April and again during a brief window in the fall, the brand can generate hype, and then encourage shoppers not to miss their chance to get it. The short selling season that could be a drawback has also been used as an upside, helping the company to build buzz. In its branding, it nods to the fruit’s heritage and to how it’s grown (painstakingly, carefully, with attention paid to each fruit). To make sure people try the product - and back up that price - AC Brands has been spreading the Sumo Citrus gospel. Over the past year, consumers spent nearly $62 million on Sumo Citrus fruits, according to Nielsen, still a small sliver of the $2.1 billion mandarin market. It has built (and built off) buzz from Instagram influencers, and placed splashy magazine ads and targeted billboards to attract consumers willing to shell out up to $4 per pound of fruit. That could be because over the past two years, AC Brands - confident in both its relationship with retailers and in the size of its crop - invested in a major marketing push to place Sumo in front of the right consumers.
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