Where Do Pineapples Grow? Costa Rica, From a Hawaiian Hybrid

For many people the pineapple “evokes the 50th state,” as Smithsonian magazine put it in 2013. Yet on Lanai, where Dole’s pineapple fields peaked at nearly 15,000 acres in the early 1980s, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1992 that only 300 acres had been planted that year. An executive of the Dole subsidiary that owned the island told the paper that the cost of producing pineapple in Hawaii was “uncompetitive.”

In 2024, Costa Rica supplied 89% of the pineapples the United States imported, by weight, according to trade data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAOSTAT), and the variety behind that trade was bred in Hawaii.

Where do pineapples grow?

Pineapples grow in the tropics and warm subtropics, mostly at low elevations, on spiky-leaved plants about 2.5 to 5 feet tall that are rooted in the soil, not on trees. Each plant normally bears a single fruit at its center. Costa Rica, the Philippines and Indonesia grow the most.

Julia Morton, in Fruits of Warm Climates (1987), called it “a tropical or near tropical plant” confined, outside greenhouses, to low elevations between 30 degrees north and 25 degrees south, though she also recorded crops grown up to 7,545 feet in Ecuador. In the continental US, the University of Florida says, pineapples are grown in protected spots in landscapes throughout Florida, and a freeze below 28 degrees Fahrenheit will kill the plant.

In colder climates they need a greenhouse. Fruit was being produced in Holland by 1686, Morton records, and when she wrote, the Azores had grown pineapples in greenhouses “for many years.”

The plant is a bromeliad rooted in the soil

A common picture puts pineapples on trees, but the pineapple is a bromeliad, a relative of Spanish moss, and unlike most bromeliads it grows in soil at ground level, the University of Florida notes. It forms a rosette of stiff, pointed leaves, 20 to 72 inches long in Morton’s account, around a short, thick stem.

When the plant is big enough, the stem sends up a head of 100 to 200 flowers arranged in a spiral, by the count in a University of Hawaii growers’ guide; North Carolina State’s extension service gives 50 to 200. Each flower stays open for one day, as a sesame flower does, and leaves a small berrylike fruitlet.

The fruitlets fuse into one fruit, and the hexagonal “eyes” on the rind are the individual fruitlets. The stem runs up through the middle and keeps growing into the leafy crown, so the core of a pineapple is the plant’s own stem, which Morton described as “fibrous but fairly succulent.”

Pollinated flowers can set small, hard seeds, Morton adds, though a pineapple generally holds only traces of undeveloped ones. A plant bears a single fruit and then declines, so farms take their next crops from suckers, side shoots that grow from the mother plant.

The first fruit takes about 18 months

On Hawaii’s plantations around 1990, a field planted with crowns needed about 18 months before its first harvest, the University of Hawaii guide says, and in hotter equatorial climates the crop can take 11 to 14 months. The same planting could then give two more crops from suckers, the last at about month 46. That is a quicker return than a cinnamon planting gives, with its first harvest two to three years after planting.

Home growers wait longer. The University of Florida tells gardeners to expect fruit 18 to 32 months after planting, and North Carolina State warns that a plant started from a crown “can take at least 24 months to flower.”

Commercial growers set the date themselves. They “force” flowering, most commonly with ethephon, a compound that releases the plant hormone ethylene, so that harvests can be scheduled to meet demand. Morton traces the method to 1874, when it was discovered by accident in the Azores that smoke would bring pineapple plants into bloom in six weeks; ethylene turned out to be the active ingredient.

Hawaii led the world, then canning moved abroad

Pineapples were growing in Hawaii by 1813, when their presence was first recorded. James Dole’s Hawaiian Pineapple Company produced its first profitable lot of canned pineapple in 1903, and by 1930 Hawaii led the world in canned pineapple and had the world’s largest canneries, a 2012 history of the industry in HortScience records. For years, Morton wrote, Hawaii supplied 70% of the world’s canned pineapple.

Canned production peaked in 1957. Del Monte’s Philippine packing company dated from 1926, by its own history, and Castle and Cooke’s Dole division opened plantations and canneries there in 1964 and in Thailand in 1972. The decline came mainly because foreign canneries had labor costs about one-tenth of Hawaii’s, Bartholomew and his co-authors write, and the last Hawaiian cannery, on Maui, closed in 2007.

By FAO’s figures, the United States grew more pineapples than any other country in 1961, but by 1975 Thailand grew twice as much. Del Monte shut the last of its fresh-fruit operation on Oahu in 2008, and Maui Land & Pineapple harvested its last crop in December 2009, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported. As of 2012, the industry history found Dole and Maui Gold still growing fresh pineapples in Hawaii, mostly for the local market.

Costa Rica grows a pineapple bred in Hawaii

As the canneries closed, the Pineapple Research Institute of Hawaii produced the MD-2 hybrid, “now the world’s pre-eminent fresh fruit cultivar.” Its “first and major beneficiary,” the 2012 history says, was Costa Rica, where Del Monte had started a fresh-fruit plantation in the late 1970s. The 2015 paper that sequenced its genome calls MD2 “the dominant pineapple variety for the global fresh fruit market.” The Cotton Candy grape, often taken for a GMO, also came from ordinary cross-breeding, a hand-pollinated cross made in 2003.

The MD-2, the variety that now leads the world’s fresh-pineapple trade, came out of Hawaii’s own breeding program while Hawaii’s canneries were closing.

Costa Rica grew 3,118,093 tonnes of pineapples in 2024, by FAOSTAT’s count, more than any other country and ahead of the Philippines and Indonesia; in 2023 Indonesia had led. Its hold on the trade is far larger: in 2023 it shipped 2.11 million tonnes abroad, 58% of world pineapple exports. US pineapple imports grew more than elevenfold between 1990 and 2024, and Costa Rica’s share of them rose from 48% to 89%.

Year	World’s top grower	Its crop (tonnes)	Costa Rica’s crop (tonnes)
1961	United States	778,360	3,500
2000	Thailand	2,248,375	903,125
2024	Costa Rica	3,118,093	3,118,093

The wild pineapple came from South America

Morton placed the pineapple’s native home in southern Brazil and Paraguay, “perhaps especially the Parana-Paraguay River” area, where its wild relatives grow, and wrote that it was apparently domesticated by Indigenous peoples and carried north to Mexico and the West Indies long before Europeans arrived. The 2015 genome paper instead puts its “initial domestication in northern South America, possibly more than 6000 BP,” meaning over 6,000 years before the present, so the two accounts disagree on where people first farmed it.

Either way, by 1493 it was “already cultivated on a continental-wide scale,” the genome paper says. The same paper records that on November 4 that year, on his second voyage, Columbus reached Guadeloupe, where at a Carib village he and his sailors encountered pineapple plants and fruit. By the end of the 16th century, the authors write, the pineapple was “pantropical.”

On the US mainland, the fruit that evokes Hawaii is usually Costa Rican, and the variety in the box was most likely bred in Hawaii as the canneries there closed. Strictly FYI.