Kerala’s most ignored fruit is suddenly big business

Every summer in Kerala, jackfruits fall with a thud.

They split open on roadsides, lie in backyards, soften too fast to keep. The smell lingers in the heat. For years, this has been part of the season. Abundance tipping quietly into waste.

Now place that image next to this. In another market, the same fruit, sliced, dried or vacuum fried, can fetch up to ₹2500 a kilo.

Somewhere between those two realities lies the story of jackfruit today.

What we have, and what we lose
Kerala produces nearly 45% of India’s jackfruit. It grows easily here, without much coaxing, in homesteads rather than plantations. It is shared, cooked, given away. It is also, quite often, ignored once there is too much of it.

Estimates suggest that over 30% of the harvest goes to waste.

Part of the problem is structural. Jackfruit is not cultivated like rubber or coffee, with clear systems for harvest, storage and sale. It comes from scattered trees, in unpredictable quantities, mostly meant for home use. Counting it accurately is difficult. Moving it efficiently is even harder.

Yet, the appetite for jackfruit has never really been the issue.

The many lives of a single fruit
In the kitchen, jackfruit has always been versatile. Tender jackfruit turns into idichakka thoran, soft and coconut-laced. The riper flesh becomes desserts, fritters, payasam. Seeds are fried, roasted, folded into curries.

Elsewhere in India, especially in the north, young jackfruit is cooked with spices into rich gravies that echo the depth of meat dishes. It has, in recent years, also found favour as a plant-based alternative in global markets.

What is new is not how we eat jackfruit, but how long we can keep it.

When excess becomes enterprise
Walk into a small bakery in parts of Kottayam today, and you will likely find kumbilappam stacked in trays. It is a simple thing. Jackfruit pulp, rice flour, jaggery, wrapped in a leaf and steamed.

But behind it sits a quiet shift.

As companies began processing jackfruit into pulp, overripe fruits that once went to waste found a buyer. With demand for kumbilappam rising, even the leaves used to wrap it now carry a price. Farmers can earn for something that was once just part of the landscape.

In some pockets, thousands of these are sold every single day, turning a seasonal fruit into a steady income stream.

The premium side of jackfruit
There is also a more polished version of this story.

Ripe jackfruit, when vacuum fried, travels well and has a growing export market. Dried jackfruit, especially from certain varieties, is even more valuable. Carefully processed, it can command prices that seem almost unreal for something so common.

Up to ₹2500 a kilo!

These are not everyday figures, but they signal what is possible when the fruit is treated less like surplus and more like produce.

A season that doesn’t have to end
Jackfruit’s biggest limitation has always been time. It ripens fast, spoils quickly, and floods the market all at once. Processing changes that.

Drying raw jackfruit reduces bulk and extends shelf life. A large batch can be stored and later turned into dishes like chakka puzhukku, bringing back the taste of the season months later. Flour, preserves, chips and beverages do the same in different ways, stretching both flavour and value.

There are already dozens of such products in circulation. There is room for many more.

The gap that remains
Kerala has the fruit. It has the familiarity. It even has early examples of successful small-scale businesses built around it. What it does not yet have is scale. Commercial cultivation is still limited. Supply chains are uneven. Much of the fruit never leaves the neighbourhood it grows in. Farmer producer groups and local enterprises have begun to bridge that gap, but the shift is still in its early stages.

The irony is hard to miss. A fruit that grows so easily, and is loved so widely, still struggles to be taken seriously as an economic crop.

For now, jackfruit continues to fall each summer. The difference is that more people are beginning to look at it differently. Not as something to use up quickly, but as something worth building around.