Citrus mac and cheese? You could get it at Roseville mandarin festival
The Mountain Mandarin Festival, which celebrated its 32nd year this weekend at a sprawling festival site in Roseville, is more a celebration of mandarins than an explosion of citrus.
The three-day festival comes just as mandarins are starting to be harvested. The season won’t peak until January.
“People are hungry and excited for them, so we sell out every day,” festival spokesperson Patrick Storm said. “There are thousands of pounds of mandarins from local Placer County farmers here, but they don’t stick around long.”
On Sunday, a troop of Boy Scouts helped cart mandarins to festival-goers who had purchased bags of sweet fruit.
The festival is about more than mandarins, Storm said. There are three stages of entertainments along with crafts and over 240 vendors selling items like mandarin jam, mandarin cupcakes and mandarin-flavored mac and cheese.
Manning a farm stand bursting with bags of mandarins, Greg Lewis, owner of Sunset Ridge Fine Fruits in Newcastle, a multi-generational organic citrus farm where visitors can pick their own mandarins, said his family always looks forward to the festival.
“The mandarins we have in this region are special,” Lewis said, adding, “I think it’s partly the microclimate combined with the minerality of the decomposed granite soil of the Sierra Nevada foothills. But mostly it’s the commitment to good growing practices. We’re organic, so we just feed the soil a lot of natural things, and we utilize cover crops and everything that soil needs to produce good fruit. That’s the secret to why this fruit tastes so good.
With perfect crisp fall weather. Storm said he estimated that this year’s three-day festival attracted around 30,000 people from around the region, a big improvement from last year, which was nearly a total washout because of an atmospheric river that hit the region.
This story was originally published November 23, 2025 at 2:03 PM.
