Every fruit bowl on Earth is a small argument about taste.
Ours has a banana going brown in it, obviously. But which fruits does the whole planet actually grow, peel, slice and squeeze the most?
We went to the source. Every year the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization tallies the harvest of nearly every crop in nearly every country, and its newest numbers, for 2024, landed last December. The world grew about 954 million tonnes of fruit that year. That’s roughly 117 kilograms, or about 258 pounds, for every person alive.
So we ranked them. Fifty fruits, counted down from the rarest crop on our list to the one you probably ate this week. Along the way you’ll meet a fruit that glows, a fruit that’s banned on Singapore’s trains, a melon that helped bring penicillin to the world, a berry that was illegal in America for decades, and a technicality that would knock the banana clean off its throne.
Grab a napkin.
How we ranked them. By the weight of the world’s harvest, the closest thing to a global vote a fruit can get. Thirty-two fruits on this list come straight from the UN FAO’s 2024 production figures. The other eighteen aren’t counted separately by the UN, so we built the best estimates we could from national agriculture statistics and published research, and marked them with ≈. Many of those are floors, so the real number is probably higher. Where the UN counts two fruits together, like lemons and limes, we kept them together.
Part one
50 to 36: The Small Batch
The bottom of the list is where things get strange: wild-picked berries, a gum tree, a fruit you eat inside out, and a few that nobody has managed to count properly.
50Gooseberries
96,000 tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Russia, 89%
The smallest crop on our list, and the only one in steep decline. The world grows roughly half as many gooseberries as it did twenty years ago, partly because the bushes carry a disease that kills pines (more on that a few spots up, when we get to the currant).
The French have the right idea about what to do with them. They call it groseille à maquereau, the mackerel berry, because its sharp green tang was the classic sauce for oily fish. Russia now grows almost nine of every ten gooseberries on Earth.
49Tamarind
≈ 220,000 tonnes estimate, India and Mexico / Top grower: India
Tamarind’s name comes from the Arabic tamr hindi, the Indian date, which is wrong twice over: it isn’t a date, and the tree is native to tropical Africa.
Crack the brittle brown pod and you’ll find a sticky, sweet-sour paste that quietly runs half the world’s pantry. It’s in pad thai, in Mexican agua de tamarindo, in chutneys from Chennai to Kingston, and very likely in the bottle of Worcestershire sauce in your fridge. India and Mexico together report about 220,000 tonnes a year. Thailand, a big grower, doesn’t publish a figure, so the true total is higher.
48Blackberries
≈ 260,000 tonnes estimate, mostly Mexico / Top grower: Mexico
Our shakiest number, so we’ll admit it up front. Nobody publishes a solid world total for blackberries, and this figure is mostly Mexico, which grew about 238,000 tonnes in 2023 and supplies much of the winter trade. The real global harvest is surely bigger, which means the blackberry probably deserves a higher seat.
Old British and Irish folklore says never to pick them after Old Michaelmas Day, October 11, when the devil spoils the brambles. Late-season mold gives the legend a little truth. Pick early.
47Mulberries
≈ 330,000 tonnes estimate, a partial count / Top grower: China
Most of the world’s mulberry trees aren’t grown for their fruit at all. They’re grown for their leaves, which feed silkworms, so nobody keeps a proper count of the berries. Turkey and three Chinese counties alone report around 330,000 tonnes.
The white mulberry holds one of botany’s strangest records: its flowers fling pollen at more than half the speed of sound, among the fastest movements in the plant kingdom. Ovid blamed the berries’ dark red stain on the doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe.
46Loquats
≈ 440,000 tonnes older estimate / Top grower: China
The loquat does everything backwards. It flowers in autumn, ripens in spring, and offers up its apricot-colored fruit when almost nothing else in the orchard is ready. The flesh tastes somewhere between a plum, a mango and a pear.
In Louisiana it goes by the wonderful name misbelief, from the Creole misplis. The best world count we could find is old, about 440,000 tonnes from China and Spain, and China has surely planted more since.
45Cranberries
620,000 tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: United States, 65%
The most North American fruit on our list. The United States and Canada grow 99% of the world’s cranberries, harvested every fall by flooding the bogs until the berries float up in a crimson slick.
The name began as craneberry, because colonists thought the nodding pink flower looked like the neck, head and bill of a crane. A Revolutionary War veteran named Henry Hall planted the first cultivated bog on Cape Cod around 1816.
44Quinces
700,000 tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Türkiye, 29%
The quince is the original marmalade. The word comes from the Portuguese marmelada, made from marmelo, the quince, and for centuries marmalade meant a firm, rosy quince paste. Oranges came later.
Raw, a quince is hard, fuzzy and astringent. Cooked low and slow it turns from cream to deep coral and smells like honey and roses. The ancient Greeks gave it to Aphrodite. Türkiye grows the most, about 203,000 tonnes.
43Currants
710,000 tonnes in 2024, red and black / Top grower: Russia, 72%
Here’s a fruit with a criminal record. Blackcurrants, like gooseberries, host white pine blister rust, so the United States banned growing them for much of the 20th century. The federal ban wasn’t lifted until 1966, and a few states still restrict them. That’s why so many Americans have never tasted one.
Britain went the other way. During the Second World War it promoted blackcurrants as a home-grown source of vitamin C, and from 1942 blackcurrant syrup was handed out free to children under two. Russia grows nearly three quarters of the world’s currants.
42Kumquats
≈ 770,000 tonnes estimate, two counties alone / Top grower: China
The only fruit on our list you’re meant to eat inside out. A kumquat’s peel is the sweet part and its pulp is the sour part, so you pop the whole thing in your mouth and let them fight it out. The name comes from the Cantonese for golden mandarin.
Around Lunar New Year, potted kumquat trees fill homes and shops across southern China and Vietnam as wishes for good fortune. Two counties in Guangxi alone report about 770,000 tonnes, so treat our number as a floor.
41Mangosteen
≈ 770,000 tonnes estimate / Top grower: Indonesia
Southeast Asia calls it the queen of fruits. A thick purple rind that stains everything it touches opens onto snowy segments that taste like peach and lychee with a little vanilla.
Here’s a trick worth knowing: count the petal-shaped lobes on the bottom of the fruit and you’ll know exactly how many segments are inside. Fresh mangosteens were illegal to import into the United States until 2007, over fears of the Asian fruit fly. Indonesia and Thailand grow most of them.
40Sapodilla
≈ 830,000 tonnes estimate, India alone / Top grower: India
In India it’s chikoo, the sandy-skinned fruit sold from carts and blended into milkshakes, with soft flesh that tastes like a pear soaked in brown sugar. India alone grows about 830,000 tonnes.
The sapodilla’s real claim to fame is its sap. The milky latex of the tree is chicle, which the Maya chewed for centuries and which became the original base of modern chewing gum. Chiclets are named after it.
39Raspberries
920,000 tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Russia, 23%
Pick a raspberry and it comes away hollow, leaving its little white core behind on the plant. That’s the easiest way to tell it from a blackberry, which keeps its core.
Each berry is really a cluster of tiny fruits called drupelets, each grown from its own part of the flower and each holding its own seed. Russia grows the most, with Mexico right behind it picking for winter tables in the US and Europe.
38Rambutan
≈ 1.1 million tonnes estimate / Top grower: Indonesia
The name comes from the Malay word for hair, and one look explains it. Rambutans wear a shaggy coat of soft red spines, like a lychee that joined a band. Peel one and the flesh is the same translucent, juicy white as its cousin, a little creamier.
Arab traders carried rambutans to Zanzibar sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries. Indonesia grows most of the world’s crop, about 875,000 tonnes in 2021.
37Figs
1.3 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Türkiye, 28%
The fig may be the first fruit people ever planted on purpose. Nine carbonized figs found near Jericho, about 11,400 years old, came from a seedless variety that could only have been propagated by hand. If that’s right, figs beat wheat and barley into the farm.
And a fig isn’t quite a fruit in the usual sense. It’s an inside-out bouquet of tiny flowers, pollinated by a fig wasp that squeezes in through a small opening at the tip. Türkiye grows more than a quarter of the world’s figs.
36Blueberries
1.4 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: United States, 29%
The rocket ship of the fruit world. The planet grows nearly six times as many blueberries as it did in 2004. Peru grew about 30 tonnes in 2010. In 2024 it grew 353,600! It’s now neck and neck with the United States.
The cultivated blueberry is surprisingly young. It was tamed in the early 1900s by USDA botanist Frederick Coville and New Jersey farmer Elizabeth Coleman White, who paid locals in the Pine Barrens for wild bushes with unusually big berries. Most of the highbush blueberries sold today trace back to that hunt.
Part two
35 to 21: Tropical Heavyweights
Now the fruit gets loud. Spiky, pink, perfumed and, in one case, banned on public transit. Several of these are everyday staples for hundreds of millions of people and exotic imports for everyone else.
35Passion Fruit
≈ 1.7 million tonnes estimate / Top grower: Brazil
Slice one open and it looks like a little geode filled with glittering, seedy gold. The name has nothing to do with romance. Missionaries in Brazil read the passion flower’s parts as symbols of the crucifixion, the Passion of Christ, and named it accordingly.
Brazil grew about 711,000 tonnes in 2023 and is usually called the biggest grower, though China’s reported crop now rivals it. The tart, perfumed pulp is the secret behind a great many tropical cocktails.
34Açaí
≈ 2.0 million tonnes 2024 estimate / Top grower: Brazil
Long before the smoothie bowl, açaí was dinner. Families along the Amazon estuary have eaten the thick purple pulp as a staple for centuries, often with fish and cassava flour.
The berries grow in heavy clusters at the top of a slender palm, and harvesters still shimmy up by hand. Brazil produced nearly 2 million tonnes in 2024, almost all of it in the state of Pará. The rest of the world mostly meets it frozen and sweetened.
33Dragon Fruit
≈ 2.9 million tonnes estimate, China and Vietnam / Top grower: China
Possibly the most photogenic thing in the produce aisle: hot pink skin, green flames, and inside, a field of white or magenta flesh freckled with tiny black seeds.
It grows on a climbing cactus whose huge white flowers open for a single night and can be pollinated by bats. The red-fleshed kinds get their color from betacyanins, the same pigments that make beets red. China and Vietnam grow most of it, about 2.9 million tonnes between them.
32Jackfruit
≈ 3.9 million tonnes estimate, India and Bangladesh / Top grower: India
Among the largest fruits that grow on trees. A single jackfruit can reach 90 centimeters long and 50 kilograms, about the weight of a big dog, hanging straight off the trunk.
Ripe, its golden pods taste like banana and pineapple with a hint of bubblegum. Unripe, it shreds like pulled pork, which is why it became a star of plant-based cooking. It’s the national fruit of Bangladesh and the state fruit of Kerala, and India grows at least 2.9 million tonnes of it.
31Longan
≈ 4.0 million tonnes estimate / Top grower: China
Longan means dragon eye in Chinese, and once you peel one you’ll see why: a glossy black seed stares out from translucent white flesh.
It’s the lychee’s mellower cousin, with an almost musky sweetness, and it’s often dried into chewy, smoky little nuggets for soups and teas. China, Thailand and Vietnam grow at least 4 million tonnes between them.
30Kiwifruit
4.4 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 49%
A Chinese fruit with a New Zealand name. A Tang dynasty poet wrote about the vine more than a thousand years ago, when it was called mihoutao, the macaque peach.
In 1904 a school principal named Isabel Fraser carried seeds home to New Zealand after visiting her sister in China. Growers there later renamed the fuzzy berry after their national bird and sold it to the world. Now China has taken the crown back, growing nearly half the world’s kiwis.
29Lychee
≈ 4.6 million tonnes recent estimate / Top grower: China
Peel back the rough pink shell and a lychee is pure perfume, rose and grape in one slippery white bite. Its most famous fan was Yang Guifei, consort of the Tang emperor Xuanzong, who had fresh lychees rushed to the capital at enormous expense.
China grows about three in every five lychees on Earth. The harvest swings wildly from year to year with the weather, so treat our number as a snapshot, not a fixed figure.
28Cherries
4.6 million tonnes in 2024, sweet and sour / Top grower: Türkiye
Cherries and apricots finished this race about 8,000 tonnes apart, a rounding error on a global harvest, so call it a photo finish. (We counted sweet and sour cherries together.)
The Roman general Lucullus is said to have carried a cultivated cherry home to Rome from Anatolia in 72 BCE, and Anatolia, today’s Türkiye, is still the world’s biggest grower. Chile is close behind, flying cherries to China in time for Lunar New Year.
27Apricots
4.6 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Türkiye, 28%
The name means early ripening. It traveled from the Latin praecoquus through Arabic al-barquq into English, which is fitting for the first stone fruit of summer. Türkiye grows more than a quarter of the world’s apricots.
A warning for anyone in the US Marine Corps: apricots are considered spectacularly bad luck, especially around tanks, a superstition documented since at least the Vietnam War. Marines call them cots, if they say the word at all.
26Durian
≈ 4.7 million tonnes 2023 estimate / Top grower: Indonesia
The world’s most polarizing fruit. Its smell is so persistent that durian is banned on Singapore’s trains and in plenty of Southeast Asian hotels. Its fans would rather walk. (If smell is your thing, we wrote a whole history of scratch and sniff.)
In 1856 the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace described the flesh as a rich custard flavored with almonds, and said it was worth a voyage to the East just to taste it. The name comes from duri, Malay for thorn. Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia grew at least 4.7 million tonnes in 2023, and China’s appetite is pushing that higher every year.
25Persimmons
5.0 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 78%
China grows almost four of every five persimmons on Earth. Bite into an astringent one too early and the tannins turn your whole mouth to chalk. Wait until it’s soft as a water balloon and it tastes like honey and apricot jam.
The English word comes from Powhatan, the Algonquian language of coastal Virginia, where colonists met the native American persimmon. In Japan, strings of peeled persimmons hang under the eaves every autumn to dry into hoshigaki.
24Guava
≈ 6.1 million tonnes estimate, India and Pakistan / Top grower: India
Pink inside, perfumed enough to fill a room, and almost impossible to count. The UN lumps guavas in with mangoes, so there’s no official world total. India alone reported 5.3 million tonnes in 2022 to 2023, and Pakistan adds another 800,000.
People in Peru were growing guava as long ago as 2500 BCE, and the word comes from the Taíno language of the Caribbean. Try it as Brazilian goiabada, a firm guava paste served with a slice of salty white cheese. Brazilians call the pairing Romeu e Julieta.
23Pomegranate
≈ 7.4 million tonnes estimate / Top grower: India
Persephone ate a few pomegranate seeds in the underworld and was bound to spend part of every year with Hades, which, the Greeks said, is why we have winter. Honestly, we understand. Each fruit holds hundreds of glossy ruby arils.
The gemstone garnet takes its name from the same Latin root as the pomegranate, granatum. India is the biggest grower, followed by China and Iran, and a dozen countries together grow at least 7.4 million tonnes.
22Jujube
≈ 7.5 million tonnes 2022, China / Top grower: China, nearly all
Here’s the most popular fruit most Americans have never tasted. China grew about 7.5 million tonnes of jujubes in 2022, nearly every jujube on Earth, and almost half of them in the deserts of Xinjiang.
Fresh, a jujube is crisp and sweet like a tiny apple. Dried, it wrinkles into a chewy red date that turns up in teas, soups and New Year sweets. Wild jujube pits have been found at Neolithic sites in China, so this is no newcomer. One more oddity: chewing a jujube leaf briefly switches off your ability to taste sweetness.
21Grapefruit and Pomelo
9.9 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 53%
The grapefruit was an accident. It turned up in Barbados in the 1700s as a chance cross between a sweet orange and a pomelo, and was first illustrated in 1750 as the Forbidden Fruit. The pomelo is the giant of the family, the largest citrus of all, with a rind thick enough to ship eggs in.
One serious note: grapefruit juice can interfere with some medications, including certain statins, so check the label. China grows more than half the world’s pomelos and grapefruits.
Part three
20 to 11: The Lunchbox Regulars
The familiar faces. If you grew up in Europe or the Americas, most of these were in your lunchbox at some point. Their backstories are wilder than you’d guess.
20Dates
9.9 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Saudi Arabia, 19%
Dates may be the oldest sweet there is. People were growing them at Mehrgarh, in what is now Pakistan, around 7000 BCE, and the fruit has fed desert travelers ever since. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Algeria grow the most.
Scientists have even coaxed roughly 2,000-year-old Judean date seeds, recovered from ancient sites near the Dead Sea, back to life. Seven of them are now growing palms, with names like Methuselah, Hannah and Judith.
19Strawberries
10.7 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 38%
The strawberry you know is barely 270 years old. It was born by accident in Brittany in the 1750s, when a North American species met a Chilean one that a French officer, the aptly named Amédée-François Frézier, had carried home in 1714. (Fraise is French for strawberry. You can’t make this up.)
Those little seeds on the outside are each technically a tiny fruit of their own. China grows the most by far, and the world’s harvest has nearly doubled since 2004. In one Japanese town, people even commute inside a giant strawberry.
18Avocados
11.2 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Mexico, 25%
Only the blueberry has had a better twenty years. The world now grows three and a half times as many avocados as it did in 2004, and the toast came along for the ride.
Every Hass avocado tree on Earth descends from a single tree grown by Rudolph Hass, a mail carrier in La Habra Heights, California, who patented it in 1935. The mother tree lived until 2002. Mexico grows a quarter of the world’s crop, much of it in Michoacán, while Colombia and the Dominican Republic are coming up fast.
17Plums
12.7 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 54%
Plums were probably among the very first fruits humans domesticated, and they’ve had time to get complicated. The European plum carries six sets of chromosomes. The Japanese plum makes do with two.
Dried, they become prunes, which the industry now prefers to call dried plums. China grows more than half the world’s crop. Romania is a distant second, and a good share of its harvest becomes the fierce plum brandy țuică.
16Papayas
14.7 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: India, 36%
A papaya tree isn’t a tree. It’s a giant herb with a hollow stem that can shoot up six to nine meters, and some plants can switch sex with the season.
In the 1990s a virus tore through Hawaii’s papaya groves and roughly halved the harvest. The rescue came in 1998 with the Rainbow, a virus-resistant papaya developed with Cornell’s Dennis Gonsalves, and it saved the industry. India grows more than a third of the world’s papayas.
15Lemons and Limes
23.2 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: India, 17%
The sour twins, counted together. India grows the most, much of it small, sharp limes squeezed over everything, and Mexico is a close second, which explains a lot about the margarita.
Speaking of which: lime juice on sunlit skin can cause a nasty blistering rash called phytophotodermatitis, better known as margarita burn. Wash your hands before the beach. The record lemon, grown in Israel in 2003, weighed 5.27 kilograms, about as much as a bowling ball.
14Olives
25.6 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Spain, 33%
Yes, the olive is a fruit, a stone fruit like a cherry, and most of the world’s crop is pressed into oil. Straight off the tree, olives are too bitter to eat, thanks to a compound called oleuropein, so every olive you’ve ever eaten was cured first.
Spain grows a third of the world’s olives. On Crete, the olive tree of Vouves is thought to be at least 3,000 years old and still bears fruit. Its branches crowned the marathon winners at the Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 Olympics.
13Pears
27.6 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 76%
China grows three of every four pears on Earth, most of them the round, crisp Asian varieties that crunch like apples.
In the West, the Bartlett and the Williams are the same pear wearing two names. It was born in England around 1770, crossed to Massachusetts, and was renamed by Enoch Bartlett, who didn’t know where it came from. Also in Massachusetts: the Endicott Pear Tree, planted around 1630 and called the oldest living cultivated fruit tree in America. Vandals hacked it apart in 1964. It grew back!
12Peaches and Nectarines
27.9 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 63%
A nectarine is just a peach without the fuzz, the result of a single genetic switch.
People in China’s lower Yangtze valley were domesticating peaches at least 7,500 years ago, and China still grows nearly two of every three peaches in the world. The Latin name, Prunus persica, nods to Persia, the route it took west. Nothing beats one eaten over the sink in August.
11Melons
28.2 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 47%
Cantaloupes, honeydews and their many cousins deserve more credit. In 1943 a moldy cantaloupe from a market in Peoria, Illinois gave a USDA lab the mold strain that became the parent of the strains used to mass-produce penicillin. Who actually found that melon is still debated.
At the other end of the luxury scale, a pair of Yubari King melons from Hokkaido sold at auction in 2019 for 5 million yen, more than $45,000. China grows almost half the world’s melons. Kazakhstan, of all places, ranks third.
Before the top ten
A Small Technicality
Botanists define a fruit as the part of a flowering plant that grows from the flower and carries the seeds. By that rule tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers and pumpkins are all fruits. Count them and the tomato, at 188.5 million tonnes, wins this whole thing by a landslide.
The US Supreme Court actually weighed in back in 1893. In Nix v. Hedden it ruled that tomatoes are vegetables, at least for the purposes of import taxes, because that’s how people cook and eat them. We’re siding with the court, and with dessert. Our list sticks to the fruits we eat as fruit.
The final countdown
The Top Ten
Ten fruits account for more than two thirds of everything the world grows. Here they are, from tenth to first.
10Pineapples
29.4 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Costa Rica, 11%
The most evenly shared crop in our top ten. No single country grows even 11% of the world’s pineapples. Costa Rica leads, just ahead of the Philippines and Indonesia, and its farms supply most of the sweet golden pineapples in American supermarkets.
Three hundred years ago a pineapple was the ultimate status symbol. Europeans spent fortunes coaxing them out of heated hothouses, hosts rented a pineapple just to show it off at a party, and in 1761 the Earl of Dunmore crowned a Scottish garden pavilion with a 37-foot stone pineapple that still stands.
Each fruit is really a hundred or more little flowers fused together, which is why the skin looks like a tiled mosaic, and a plant takes about two years to make one. Pay your respects at the next brunch.
9Plantains
44.6 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Uganda, 27%
Meet the banana’s savory twin. Plantains are starchier, firmer and almost always cooked: fried into tostones and kelewele, boiled and pounded into fufu, roasted at the roadside, mashed into mofongo. For tens of millions of people across Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America they’re not a snack but a staple, closer to potatoes or rice than to fruit salad.
Africa is the center of the plantain world. Uganda grows more than a quarter of the global crop, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cameroon, and the rainforests of Central and West Africa hold more than a hundred varieties, the greatest plantain diversity anywhere, even though the plant’s ancestors came from Southeast Asia.
The English name comes from the Spanish plátano. It has nothing to do with the plantain weed in your lawn.
8Mandarins
51.9 million tonnes in 2024, with tangerines and clementines / Top grower: China, 52%
The easiest fruit on Earth to peel, and the reason the world now grows nearly twice as many mandarins, tangerines and clementines as it did twenty years ago. Seedless, zippered, sized for a lunchbox: the little citrus is quietly gaining on the orange.
The name comes from the officials of imperial China, whose robes were likened to the fruit’s deep color. The clementine has a sweeter origin story. In 1902 a French missionary, Brother Clément Rodier, found it in the orchard of an orphanage in Misserghin, Algeria, and grafted it from a wild tree growing among thorn bushes.
China grows more than half the world’s mandarins, and every Lunar New Year they’re given away by the bagful, their gold color standing in for good fortune.
7Mangoes
62.2 million tonnes in 2024, with guavas and mangosteens / Top grower: India, 45%
India doesn’t just grow mangoes. It’s in love with them. The country grows nearly half the world’s crop (the UN counts mangoes together with guavas and mangosteens, but mangoes make up the bulk), cultivates more than a thousand named varieties, and eats almost everything it picks. The Mughal emperor Akbar planted an orchard of 100,000 mango trees, the Lakh Bagh, near Darbhanga in the 1500s.
The world’s mango harvest has nearly doubled since 2004. A ripe Alphonso, Kesar or Ataulfo is so juicy that the only sensible way to eat one is over a sink, in a swimsuit, or both!
One small warning. Mangoes are related to poison ivy, and their skin carries a cousin of the same irritant, so people sensitive to poison ivy can get a rash from the peel while enjoying the flesh just fine.
6Coconuts
65.5 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Indonesia, 27%
Botanically, the coconut is a drupe, a stone fruit like a peach, with a husk where the juicy flesh would be. It might be the most useful plant on the planet: water, milk, oil, meat, fiber, shell and timber. Indonesia, India and the Philippines grow about 72% of the world’s coconuts between them.
The name is a little joke. Coco comes from an old Spanish and Portuguese word for a grinning face, after the three dark pores on the shell that look like two eyes and a mouth. Look at one now and you’ll never unsee it.
A genetic study of more than 1,300 coconuts found that people domesticated them twice, once in the Pacific and once at the southern tip of India, before Portuguese sailors carried the Indian Ocean type to Africa and the Americas.
5Oranges
67.2 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: Brazil, 23%
The orange named the color, not the other way around. English speakers called the fruit an orange from the late 1300s, more than a century before they used the word for the shade. The word traveled from the Sanskrit naranga through Persian, Arabic, Italian and French, losing its first n somewhere along the way.
Brazil grows nearly a quarter of the world’s oranges, most of them squeezed into juice, and if you drank orange juice this week there’s a good chance it started in São Paulo. Here’s the quiet surprise in the data, though: global orange production has barely moved in twenty years, up just 8%, as citrus greening disease ravages groves from Florida to Brazil and mandarins steal the snack market.
And that bellybutton on a navel orange? It’s a tiny, underdeveloped second fruit. The navel began as a mutation on a single tree in Bahia, Brazil, and because the fruit is seedless, every navel orange tree since is a grafted clone.
4Grapes
75.9 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 22%
A huge share of the world’s grapes never see a fruit bowl. They’re crushed into wine, dried into raisins or pressed into juice. China grows the most, ahead of Italy and Spain, and much of the Chinese crop is eaten fresh.
Grapevines can be astonishingly long-lived. In Maribor, Slovenia, a Žametovka vine more than 400 years old still produces 35 to 55 kilograms of grapes a year, and its wine is bottled in tiny quarter-liter keepsakes.
Whatever you do, don’t microwave them. Two touching grapes trap microwaves so efficiently that they spark into a ball of glowing plasma, a party trick that physicists finally explained in 2019.
3Apples
97.9 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 52%
The apple’s family tree has an address: the wild forests of the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan, where its ancestor Malus sieversii still grows. Researchers estimate that wild apple supplies nearly half of the modern apple’s genome, and the old name of nearby Almaty, Alma-Ata, is often translated as father of the apples.
From there the apple rode the Silk Road and took over the world. Today China grows more apples than every other country combined, more than 51 million tonnes. The United States is a distant second at 4.9 million.
Apples are also the great shape-shifters. Their seeds never grow true, so every Honeycrisp, Gala and Granny Smith tree is a graft. Plant a seed from your Fuji and you’ll get a stranger. The heaviest on record, picked in Hirosaki, Japan, in 2005, weighed 1.849 kilograms, about as much as a pineapple.
2Watermelons
105.0 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: China, 61%
Here’s the number that stopped us. China grows six of every ten watermelons on Earth, 63.5 million tonnes, more than the entire world grows of mangoes. Watermelon is summer in China the way it is in the American South, piled on trucks and cracked open on the sidewalk.
Its story starts in northeast Africa. Genome studies point to the Kordofan melon of Sudan as the closest wild relative, and a Nile Valley tomb painting about 4,360 years old appears to show watermelon served as dessert. Since then it has been bred into a 92% water, 100% joy machine.
The heaviest on record, grown by Chris Kent in Tennessee in 2013, weighed 159 kilograms, roughly the weight of two grown men. Somebody in Japan even designed a bag made to carry exactly one perfect watermelon.
1Bananas
139.4 million tonnes in 2024 / Top grower: India, 27%
The banana wins, and it isn’t close. The world grew 139.4 million tonnes in 2024, a third more than the runner-up, and that’s before you add the 44.6 million tonnes of plantains. Bananas and plantains together make up about a fifth of all the fruit grown on Earth.
India is the banana’s biggest fan by a mile. It grows more than a quarter of the world’s crop, 37.6 million tonnes, and eats nearly all of it at home. The bananas in Western supermarkets come from somewhere else entirely, mostly Latin America and the Philippines, and almost all of them are one variety, the Cavendish.
It’s named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, whose gardener Joseph Paxton grew it in the glasshouses at Chatsworth in the 1830s. The Cavendish took over the world in the 1950s, after Panama disease wiped out its predecessor, the Gros Michel, and a new strain of that same disease now threatens the Cavendish too.
One last thing, because it’s too good to leave out. Shine an ultraviolet light on a ripe banana and its peel glows blue! Scientists in Innsbruck worked out why in 2008: as the fruit ripens, its chlorophyll breaks down into fluorescent compounds. The banana has been glowing at us the whole time.
The whole bowl
All Fifty, at a Glance
| Rank | Fruit | World harvest | Top grower |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bananas | 139.4 million tonnes | India, 27% |
| 2 | Watermelons | 105.0 million tonnes | China, 61% |
| 3 | Apples | 97.9 million tonnes | China, 52% |
| 4 | Grapes | 75.9 million tonnes | China, 22% |
| 5 | Oranges | 67.2 million tonnes | Brazil, 23% |
| 6 | Coconuts | 65.5 million tonnes | Indonesia, 27% |
| 7 | Mangoes | 62.2 million tonnes | India, 45% |
| 8 | Mandarins | 51.9 million tonnes | China, 52% |
| 9 | Plantains | 44.6 million tonnes | Uganda, 27% |
| 10 | Pineapples | 29.4 million tonnes | Costa Rica, 11% |
| 11 | Melons | 28.2 million tonnes | China, 47% |
| 12 | Peaches and Nectarines | 27.9 million tonnes | China, 63% |
| 13 | Pears | 27.6 million tonnes | China, 76% |
| 14 | Olives | 25.6 million tonnes | Spain, 33% |
| 15 | Lemons and Limes | 23.2 million tonnes | India, 17% |
| 16 | Papayas | 14.7 million tonnes | India, 36% |
| 17 | Plums | 12.7 million tonnes | China, 54% |
| 18 | Avocados | 11.2 million tonnes | Mexico, 25% |
| 19 | Strawberries | 10.7 million tonnes | China, 38% |
| 20 | Dates | 9.9 million tonnes | Saudi Arabia, 19% |
| 21 | Grapefruit and Pomelo | 9.9 million tonnes | China, 53% |
| 22 | Jujube | ≈ 7.5 million tonnes | China, nearly all |
| 23 | Pomegranate | ≈ 7.4 million tonnes | India |
| 24 | Guava | ≈ 6.1 million tonnes | India |
| 25 | Persimmons | 5.0 million tonnes | China, 78% |
| 26 | Durian | ≈ 4.7 million tonnes | Indonesia |
| 27 | Apricots | 4.6 million tonnes | Türkiye, 28% |
| 28 | Cherries | 4.6 million tonnes | Türkiye |
| 29 | Lychee | ≈ 4.6 million tonnes | China |
| 30 | Kiwifruit | 4.4 million tonnes | China, 49% |
| 31 | Longan | ≈ 4.0 million tonnes | China |
| 32 | Jackfruit | ≈ 3.9 million tonnes | India |
| 33 | Dragon Fruit | ≈ 2.9 million tonnes | China |
| 34 | Açaí | ≈ 2.0 million tonnes | Brazil |
| 35 | Passion Fruit | ≈ 1.7 million tonnes | Brazil |
| 36 | Blueberries | 1.4 million tonnes | United States, 29% |
| 37 | Figs | 1.3 million tonnes | Türkiye, 28% |
| 38 | Rambutan | ≈ 1.1 million tonnes | Indonesia |
| 39 | Raspberries | 920,000 tonnes | Russia, 23% |
| 40 | Sapodilla | ≈ 830,000 tonnes | India |
| 41 | Mangosteen | ≈ 770,000 tonnes | Indonesia |
| 42 | Kumquats | ≈ 770,000 tonnes | China |
| 43 | Currants | 710,000 tonnes | Russia, 72% |
| 44 | Quinces | 700,000 tonnes | Türkiye, 29% |
| 45 | Cranberries | 620,000 tonnes | United States, 65% |
| 46 | Loquats | ≈ 440,000 tonnes | China |
| 47 | Mulberries | ≈ 330,000 tonnes | China |
| 48 | Blackberries | ≈ 260,000 tonnes | Mexico |
| 49 | Tamarind | ≈ 220,000 tonnes | India |
| 50 | Gooseberries | 96,000 tonnes | Russia, 89% |
The ones we couldn’t weigh
A few favorites didn’t make the cut because nobody counts them. Soursop, breadfruit, star fruit and cherimoya are grown across the tropics, but their harvests are tiny, scattered or simply unrecorded. Lingonberries and elderberries are mostly picked wild. Yuzu, the cult citrus of Japan and Korea, is grown in quantities too small to place. Consider this their honorable mention.
How we built the list
Thirty-two fruits use the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2024 production figures from FAOSTAT, released in December 2025. Top growers and shares come from the same data, using mainland China where China appears. Growth figures compare 2004 with 2024.
For the eighteen fruits the UN doesn’t count separately, we used the best published figures we could find: China’s National Bureau of Statistics for jujube, Brazil’s IBGE for açaí and passion fruit, India’s horticulture statistics for guava, jackfruit, sapodilla and tamarind, national agriculture agencies in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia for durian, longan, rambutan and mangosteen, Mexico’s SIAP for blackberries, and peer-reviewed or industry research for pomegranate, lychee, dragon fruit, kumquat, loquat and mulberry. Where we only had a few countries’ numbers, we added them up and treated the total as a floor. Those fruits could deserve a higher spot, and we’ll update the list as better numbers arrive.
Questions, Answered
What is the most popular fruit in the world?
The banana. The world grew 139.4 million tonnes in 2024, according to the UN FAO, a third more than watermelons in second place. Add plantains and the banana family makes up about a fifth of all the fruit grown on Earth.
Which fruit is growing fastest?
Blueberries. The world harvest has grown nearly sixfold since 2004, led by new farms in Peru. Avocados are second, up about three and a half times.
Is a tomato a fruit?
Botanically, yes, and if we counted it the tomato would be the most grown fruit in the world at 188.5 million tonnes. In the kitchen, and according to a US Supreme Court ruling from 1893, it’s a vegetable.
Keep exploring
Still hungry? See 98 foods cut into perfect 2.5cm cubes, the artist who turns fruit and candy into perfect patterns, and our deep dive on salt. For more countdowns like this one, try the 50 largest cities in the world and 100 of the most common stereotypes.
