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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TROPICAL FRUITS FOREVER  
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Diana Kruzman
January 9, 2026
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_ As the only place in the continental US where it almost never
freezes, South Florida can support fruits usually only found in the
tropics; thanks to new advances in plant breeding and growing interest
from consumers, the industry here is booming. _

As citrus has moved out, tropical fruits have moved in.,
jeannetteferrary.photoshelter.com

 

South Florida is the growing epicenter of America’s rare and exotic
fruit industry.

 

About 40 minutes south of Miami, gleaming high-rises and snarled
traffic give way to country roads lined with lush greenery. Here,
sprawling out from the agricultural town of Homestead, is the center
of South Florida’s tropical fruit industry, which produces specialty
crops that thrive in the hot and humid climate.

 

On a balmy afternoon in November, I drove past farms with names like
“Tropical Sugar” and “Vietnamese Fruits Garden” to reach the
University of Florida’s Tropical Research And Education Center, or
TREC. The center’s associate director, Jonathan Crane, showed off
row after row of fruit trees on the facility’s 160-acre campus.
Some, like papaya, guava, and lychee, I recognized, while others —
mamey sapote, carambola, sapodilla — I had never heard of.

 

As the only place in the continental United States where it almost
never freezes (Crane cautioned that though rare, occasional freezes do
happen, so growers shouldn’t get too complacent), South Florida can
support the kinds of fruits usually only found in the tropics, which
start about 1,000 miles to the south, below the Tropic of Cancer. And
thanks to new advances in plant breeding as well as growing interest
from consumers, the tropical fruit industry here is booming.

 

For anyone interested in cutting-edge plant research and growing new
varieties commercially, Crane told me: “South Florida’s the place
to be.”

Florida is famous for its citrus industry, which once raked in
billions of dollars annually. The state has long sold its renowned
fruit around the country, with marketing campaigns promoting products
such as Florida’s Natural orange juice. But starting in the
mid-2000s, a bacterial disease called Huanglongbing, or HLB (also
known as citrus greening), tore through
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state’s orange groves, crippling trees and reducing yields by over
90 percent. As citrus has moved out
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tropical fruits have moved in, Crane said, offering growers
alternative crops that allow them to continue working with trees —
though not nearly to the same extent as before.

Though oranges remain Florida’s top fruit crop, generating $197
million in revenue each year, the tropical fruit industry, which
consists of higher-value crops like avocadoes and mangoes as well as
more niche fruits like starfruit and guava, isn’t far behind. The
state’s 15,000 acres of tropical fruit groves rake in $100 million
in annual revenue, up from 12,000 acres and $74 million two decades
ago. That’s still small compared to ornamental plants and
vegetables, the state’s other top agricultural commodities
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but the industry has potential because of the uniquely high value of
its crops, Crane told me.

Vanilla, for example, is one of the most expensive spices in the
world, because the plants have to be pollinated by hand and are
susceptible to disease. The vanilla industry is currently concentrated
in Madagascar, but TREC is working on developing a variety
of self-pollinating, disease-resistant vanilla
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could provide valuable opportunities for Florida growers.

Using conventional breeding as well as genetic modification
techniques, researchers at TREC are working to introduce other
varieties of tropical fruits, such as papayas, mangoes, dragonfruit,
and avocados, which could become agricultural commodities in the
region. They share their knowledge as well as access to these
varieties with farmers through the university’s agricultural
extension service, Crane explained. The goal, he said, is to encourage
growers to diversify their production, making operations more
resistant to fluctuations in the climate and the market.

 

“[Growers say:] you’re telling me to diversify — so, what do I
grow?” Crane said. “By us testing and developing these alternative
crops, it helps them figure out [their options].”

Even if these fruits can be grown in Florida, however, questions
remain about how to get consumers interested in them, or how to ship
them to other states. So far, many customers have come from immigrant
communities around the U.S. who already know about niche tropical
fruits and are willing to pay a premium to ship them quickly —
before they spoil. Other fruits can only be bought from in-state or
local customers, as they need to be eaten shortly after harvest.

Still, as the tropical fruit industry grows in South Florida, it’s
also attracting tourists who come specifically to experience produce
they can’t find anywhere else in the continental U.S. The Fairchild
Tropical Botanic Garden
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just south of Miami, hosts an annual mango festival in the summer,
while the Truman’s Tropical Fruit Festival
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the former president’s home in Key West offers tropical fruit trees
for sale. Miami-Dade County’s Fruit & Spice Park
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37-acre botanical garden home to over 500 varieties of fruits,
vegetables, spices, and herbs, allows visitors to collect as many
fruits as they want from the ground with the price of admission.

A few miles down the road from the TREC facility, I stopped by
the Robert Is Here fruit stand
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a south Florida institution founded in 1959 and still run to this day
by 72-year-old Robert Moehling and his family. True to the name,
Moehling was there when I arrived, carving up fruit behind the counter
and suggesting the ripest passion fruit for customers to choose. (Tip:
“The worse they look, the sweeter they taste.”) He told me that
since the citrus greening disease claimed almost all of Florida’s
citrus, tropical fruit is “all we’ve got left.”

Although it’s expanding now, the tropical fruit industry isn’t new
to Florida, with curious growers planting crops like mango, avocado,
lychee, pineapple, and key lime as far back as the mid-19th-century.
David Fairchild, a botanist responsible for bringing more than 200,000
varieties of plants into the United States from around the world (and
for whom the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is named), introduced
many of these species to the state, seeing that its climate could
support plants incapable of growing elsewhere in the country.

Some growers are now taking advantage of newfound consumer interest to
build on South Florida’s long history with these crops. The family
of Alexandria Garner, a 17-year-old senior at the Palmer Trinity
School in Palmetto Bay, Florida, grows over 70 varieties of mangoes,
along with dozens of other rare tropical fruits, on their farm in
Homestead, called Jamy Mango [[link removed]].
Garner, who plans to take over the 15-acre operation after finishing
college, showed me around. The mango trees here were planted in 1949,
and her parents bought the land in 2022, seeking a future in
agriculture after serving in the military.

In the past few years, they’ve seen demand for online fruit sales
skyrocket, particularly for lychees and jamun
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type of tropical berry native to Southeast Asia and known as the
“Java plum.” Much of it comes from immigrant communities living in
the U.S. who seek fruits they grew up with in Vietnam or Bangladesh,
but which are difficult to import and impossible to grow outside of
Florida’s tropical climate.

“We’ve had people write poems for us about a specific fruit”
that they haven’t been able to eat since leaving their home
countries, Garner said. “They reminisce — like wow, I had this as
a child.”

Other people have developed a taste for so-called “designer”
mangoes — new varieties bred for their unique flavors, many of which
were developed by Florida horticulturalist Gary Zill
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sherbet
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mangoes are said to taste like creamsicles; “cotton candy
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varieties evoke spun sugar. Connoisseurs of these rare breeds (who,
within the community, refer to themselves self-consciously as “mango
snobs
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are willing to pay premium prices of more than $25 per pound.

Florida mangoes have another leg up on their competitors from abroad
thanks to the USDA’s imported fruit screenings. All mangoes shipped
into the U.S. must be disinfected to prevent foreign pests or diseases
from entering the country and threatening the domestic agricultural
industry. That process involves either boiling the fruit or zapping it
with radiation, which tends to leach out nearly all of its flavor.
(Some enthusiasts bypass these screenings by purchasing their mangoes
from smugglers
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WhatsApp.)

Crane said that although climate change is opening up opportunities
for growing fully tropical fruits such as guanabanas or papayas —
which tend not to like weather below 60 degrees — in southern
Florida, it’s also making it harder to produce others. Lychees, for
example, require exposure to “cool, non-freezing temperatures”
between 32 and 59 degrees, without which they have difficulty
flowering. “Down here, it’s gotten harder and harder to have cool
temperatures because the climate is warming,” Crane said.

The Florida tropical fruit industry faces other challenges, too.
Developers are swallowing up more and more farmland each year to build
homes for the state’s rapidly growing population, while fruit
growers struggle to compete with low-cost imports. Farms like
Garner’s also suffer from diseases and pests, while hurricanes can
batter mangoes to the point that some people may not want to buy them.

At the same time, she’s excited about the potential for growth in
the future, especially for mangoes. Garner said she’s planning on
grafting some of the specialty varieties, like orange sherbet, onto
the nearly century-old mango trees in her family’s plot to increase
production. Jamy Mango also just received its organic certification
from the USDA, and Garner believes fruits grown without chemical
fertilizers or pesticides will draw in a dedicated customer base.

“People really want organic, straight-from-the-tree fruit,” Garner
said. By buying imported fruits from the grocery store, she added,
“we are just losing so much flavor out of our fruit that we don’t
even know what we’re missing out on.”

DIANA KRUZMAN

Diana Kruzman is a freelance journalist covering agriculture, climate
change, and the environment, in the U.S. and around the world. Her
work has appeared in National Geographic, Undark, Earther, and other
publications. She lives in New York City

 

 

 

* Florida
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* citrus
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* fruit industry
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