You Have Probably Never Heard of New Zealand's Unofficial National Fruit

The scent comes first, when you sink your knife – or your teeth – into a feijoa’s skin. It is zingy, heady, a burst of bright perfumed flavour unlike any other. In New Zealand, the traditional method is to scoop out the creamy-clear insides with a teaspoon and discard the skins, though in other parts of the world people simply eat them whole. In the centre, the flesh is translucent and jelly-like where the tiny seeds hang in spiralled suspension. Closer to the skin, it is opaque and slightly gritty. Some have compared the taste to a mixture of pineapples and strawberries, but really, the flavour is something all its own. — Feijoa: A Story of Obsession and Belonging by Kate Evans.

When we redid our backyard in 2016, my wife suggested planting some pineapple guava trees. I agreed, and promptly forgot about the decision. They became part of the landscaping.

A couple of years later, on one of those early fall afternoons when the air suddenly feels cool, I caught a whiff of a familiar scent. I followed it to the pineapple guava trees and found the ground littered with oval green fruits, bruised from their fall.

“Those are feijoas!!”

I had never thought deeply about feijoa. They were omnipresent in New Zealand, especially in the autumn when feijoas covered the ground in neighborhoods across the country. Yet I don’t recall ever seeing them for sale in the supermarket. They would show up occasionally as flavors in chocolate or beer (yuck), before disappearing just as quickly.

The major commercial fruit and vegetable crops in New Zealand are wine grapes, kiwifruit, and apples. Together these three crops occupy over 60,000 hectares. In 2024, there were just 116 hectares of commercial feijoa trees. That’s about 200 (American) football fields — so little you can barely see it on the graph below.

The feijoa originated in South America and spread around the world in the early 20th century. In Santa Barbara, California, a horticulturalist name Francesco Franceschi proclaimed feijoa the “coming fruit of the century”. Numerous plant breeders around the world attempted to develop it for commercial production.

However, it never became a major commercially produced fruit. Instead, the feijoa is a backyard staple in New Zealand, as well as in places like Davis, California. It’s an attractive evergreen tree that flowers in the spring and produces fruit in the fall.

Why did the kiwifruit take off while the feijoa did not?

Feijoa arrived in New Zealand in the 1920s around the same time as the kiwifruit, which was then known as the Chinese Gooseberry because of its origin and similar taste to the common gooseberry.

In the 1930s, a horticulturalist named Hayward Wright developed a variety of Chinese Gooseberry that produced large tasty fruit and had a long shelf life. Fruit packers started exporting it. In 1959, they renamed it the kiwifruit in honor of New Zealand’s national bird and it took off. If only they had trademarked the name!

The feijoa, by contrast, has poor shelf life, bruises easily, is difficult to propagate and pollinate, and there is no guaranteed way of telling if the fruit is ripe until you cut it open. These features do not make for a profitable crop.

I had none of these worries with the feijoas littering my yard. I picked up the best-looking 25 of them, scooped out the insides and used them to make jam. It was the first (and perhaps last) time I made jam, and it tasted great on my morning toast.

Our dog enjoyed eating many of the rest of our crop.

A recent book by Kate Evans provides a beautiful ode to the feijoa, covering its life, history and place in the culture. I’ll close with this sentence from her book:

In the United States, where feijoas are called pineapple guavas, a 1912 newspaper article declared, ‘he who drinks beer, thinks beer. But he who eats pineapple guava thinks of pineapple, raspberries, and banana, all at once.’

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!