Why Seedless Lemons Are Taking Over Grocery Stores’ Citrus Section

My latest story – on the next big bet from the billionaires behind Halos mandarins, Pom Wonderful and Fiji Water – published yesterday. Stewart and Lynda Resnick are all-in on selling seedless lemons, and think that their exclusively licensed, seedless variety could control 25% of the entire U.S. fresh lemon market within 15 years.

The Resnicks are among the few farmers who can make this kind of investment, though a warming planet and water scarcity are expected to threaten citrus trees like lemons. The Resnicks own 155,000 farmland acres, with nearly 125,000 planted in California alone. They have the power to dictate what is sold, and they plan out what they hope consumers will want a decade or more prior to those foods ever securing space in grocery stores.

This feature was the first one to come out of my recent reporting trip to California and the Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s fresh produce comes from. The farmland I saw there earlier this month was the wettest I’ve seen in a decade of reporting. But that still doesn’t mean drought and other impacts from climate change aren’t getting worse over time, or that the centralization of food production in California won’t create vulnerability in the future.

The newest IPCC report, out earlier this week, continued to keep me sober: The crisis isn’t dire yet, but inaction will be.

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.

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What’s Fresh

Seedless Lemons Are The Next Big Bet From The Billionaires Behind Halos, Pom Wonderful And Fiji Water. A rare peek inside their agricultural empire shows how Stewart and Lynda Resnick are going all in on the innovative citrus fruit. By Yours Truly.

Transforming Food Policy: Could This Be The Year We Get It Right? Food Tank’s Danielle Nierenberg makes a bold prediction that she desperately hope comes true: This year, 2023, could be the most influential year in a generation for food and agriculture systems in the United States.

UN Food Systems Envoy Responds To Climate Inaction. As Daphne Ewing-Chow reports, former Rwandan agriculture minister Dr. Agnes Kalibata says that Africa would be more resilient to climate change if it received Marshall plan-style “real” investments as opposed to incremental solutions that have not enabled comprehensive change.

Grapes Were Probably The First Fruit Domesticated By Humans. Scientists have unearthed more information on the origins of wine. Using genomics, researchers have discovered that grapevines were first domesticated simultaneously in two separate regions of the world around 11,000 years ago.

Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.

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