RIVERSIDE, CA - With more than four decades in the citrus industry, Vince Mazzetti, Vice President of Goody | Blue Banner Company, shares his perspective on the forces shaping organic citrus today. Drawing on decades of experience growing, packing, and marketing citrus, Mazzetti explores evolving consumer demand, retail trends, and what he believes lies ahead for the category.
I didn't choose the citrus business. The citrus business chose me — and I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to pay.
I grew up around the groves and alongside the packing house floor. Long before I ever held a title or signed a contract, I was watching my grandfather move through the operation with the kind of quiet authority that doesn't come from a job description. It comes from ownership — not just of a business, but of a standard. My father carried that same standard. He took immense pride in every job the company created, in every client relationship he built, and in the idea that serving others well was not a strategy — it was a way of life.
I absorbed all of it. The planting cycles, the irrigation decisions, the pruning philosophy, the grading standards, the cold chain discipline. I pestered the people on the floor with questions because I genuinely needed to understand how everything connected from the moment a piece of fruit left the tree to the moment it reached a consumer's table. The men and women who worked in our packing house weren't just employees. They were an extension of our family, and they shaped the way I think about this business to this day.
Since 1986, I've worked full-time at Blue Banner Company, building on what my grandfather started and what my father grew. Now, as Vice President and at the helm of Goody, our new direct sales division, I've invested more than forty years of heart and strategic focus into carrying this legacy forward with integrity. And right now, I'm writing to you from what I believe is the most consequential stretch of transformation this industry has seen in my lifetime.
If you're in citrus — growing it, packing it, shipping it, or buying it — the next eighteen months are going to separate operations that positioned themselves well from those that didn't. Here's what I'm seeing.
The Organic Wave Isn't Cresting — It's Still Building
Let me start with the headline number, because it stopped me cold when I first read it: organic citrus sales climbed 18.1% in 2025. Not organic produce broadly — organic citrus specifically. That's part of a larger story in which total U.S. organic food sales reached $70.1 billion last year, growing at 6.8% — double the pace of the conventional food market. For the third consecutive year, organic outpaced the total marketplace.
I've watched the organic segment build for over two decades, and I can tell you that kind of sustained momentum isn't a trend anymore. It's a structural shift. The consumers driving it — particularly younger households — aren't buying organic citrus because it's fashionable. They're buying it because they've come to see the USDA Organic seal as a baseline standard of trust. When I sit across from our retail buyers today, they're not asking whether to expand their organic citrus set. They're asking how much they can get and when.
The global data reinforces what we're seeing on the ground. The citrus fruits market overall is projected to climb from roughly $150 billion in 2026 toward $160 billion by 2027, with organic as the fastest-growing lane within that expansion. Demand for organic citrus has increased nearly 27% across U.S. retail channels, and fresh citrus purchases overall are up 31% at retail. Those aren't numbers you ignore — and they're numbers that validate decades of commitment to quality and customer-centered service.
What's Actually Driving the Demand
My father had a saying I've carried with me my whole career: if you serve people better than anyone else, everything else takes care of itself. The market data is proving him right in new ways.
Health and immunity have become permanent purchase drivers, not pandemic-era habits that faded when the world reopened. Consumers have genuinely locked in the idea of citrus — particularly organic citrus — as functional food. Nearly half of U.S. consumers now report prioritizing citrus for daily nutrition. The wellness-shot category, citrus-infused beverages, and immune-support supplements all feed back into fresh and organic demand in ways that simply weren't factors a decade ago.
Then there's the transparency piece, and this one hits close to home for me. Consumers — especially younger buyers — want to know where their food comes from, how it was grown, and what was or was not applied to it. They want to trust the source. The organic certification answers those questions in a single label, but what truly backs that label is the integrity of every person and every operation in the supply chain. At Goody and Blue Banner, we don't take that lightly. The reputation we've built over three generations is only as strong as the last shipment we sent out the door.
See Vince Mazzetti's full thoughts and outlook here.
