In the shady hills of Appalachia, a small fruit tree grows in the shadow of taller oaks and maples. In the spring, maroon flowers droop from the branches. Little fruits emerge later in the summer and fall — alien green, bean-shaped, and about the weight of one or two large peaches.
The fruit is ready for picking once it's soft to touch and emits an aroma similar to tropical fruits. Inside, large espresso-brown seeds dot the yellow pulp, which tastes of tangy, mango-banana-pineapple and has the texture of custard.
This is the common pawpaw, a fruit whose native range extends from Ontario down into Florida and as far west as Kansas. Pawpaws aren't widely accessible in stores, but this hard-to-get fruit has gained a cult following in recent decades — and the supply simply isn't meeting the demand. Growers can sell out within hours. Festivals celebrating the fruit have popped up across the country. At farmers markets pawpaws typically cost $2- 15 per pound, while online retailers often charge even more.
Pawpaws aren't the only promising crops piquing people's interest. New, emerging, and under-cultivated crops like honeyberries, hazelnuts, and Kernza are also gaining interest for reasons ranging from their purported health benefits to their potential climate resilience. Importantly, these crops can add economic and ecological diversity to farms.
But the excitement comes with a reality check: "If it was real easy, I think it would have probably taken off," said Andrew Thomas, a horticulturist at the University of Missouri who has worked on edible yet under-utilized native plant species. Growers and researchers must study everything from cultivation to marketing, said Steffen Mirsky, an emerging crops program outreach coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As an emerging crop, pawpaws pose their fair share of challenges — namely, they're difficult to store and ship. While processed products, which are more durable, seem promising, such techniques still need improvement. That work requires funding, though, which can be hard to procure for an unestablished crop.
Still, all crops start somewhere. Anya Osatuke, a small fruit specialist at Cornell Cooperative Extension, explained that it takes concerted effort to produce the appealing, durable foods we see in produce aisles. "You don't even notice it," she said.
"I don't think any of us expected it to be the next kiwi at Kroger," said Kirk Pomper, a horticulturist and research lead of Kentucky State University's pawpaw research program. But he still sees expansion in the pawpaw's future: "It just has a lot of potential."
Though thousands of edible plants species exist — estimates range from 7,000 to 30,000 — only a small fraction are widely cultivated. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, just 10 crops account for 65 percent of crop harvested areas across the globe. Yet, crop diversity is critical for agricultural success. Homogenous farming is more susceptible to the ever-growing list of threats agriculture faces: increasing temperatures, shifting weather patterns, and low soil quality, to name a few.
Crops vary in their vulnerability to different threats, so if one plant does poorly, a diverse farm could fall back on others to produce food, said Osatuke. Some new crops also introduce opportunities to test sustainable growing techniques onto a farm and to add new nutrients into people's diets.
"If it was real easy, I think it would have probably taken off."
But many emerging crops, including the pawpaw, aren't going to solve existing problems alone; still, farmers see the crop as an opportunity for profit. With the current demand for pawpaw exceeding supply, Pomper said, it could bring in a lot of money for those who decide to grow it.
Though fossil records show that plants similar to the modern pawpaw have grown in North America for millions of years, and written records note that Native Americans were cultivating the fruit in the 1500s, growers and researchers didn't start seriously looking to the fruit as a viable crop until a few decades ago. Mirsky explained that many new crops require a champion to push them forward. In the 1970s, pawpaws found their champion in R. Neal Peterson.
Peterson tasted his first pawpaw, from a wild growing tree, in his university's arboretum as a graduate student studying plant genetics. "By intuition, I just immediately imagined the potential," he said.
But wild-growing pawpaws were inconsistent in flavor. So, outside of his day job as an agricultural economist, Peterson began breeding pawpaws in Maryland with an eye toward developing fruits suitable for commercialization. He tracked down historic collections of cultivated pawpaws based on library records and then selected seeds for his own orchard. Over the past five decades of careful plant selection and crossing, he developed seven cultivars (akin to Granny Smith or Fuji for apples), building upon what he describes as the centuries-long undocumented work of Native American fruit cultivators.
Then, in 1990, the pawpaw got another push. Kentucky State University established the only full-time dedicated pawpaw research program centered around developing the fruit as a commercial crop. More than three decades later, the USDA included pawpaws in the Census of Agriculture for the first time ever, reporting almost 800 acres of pawpaw crops spread across nearly 1,500 farms in its 2022 census.
While large supermarket chains have approached Pomper and the Kentucky State program to note their interest in stocking the fruit in stores, he told Undark, most growers are producing small crops and would not be able to supply the supermarkets' needs at present. Despite the rising recognition of the pawpaw, its uniqueness is at once a valuable trait and a major roadblock.
This past spring at KSU's 12-acre pawpaw orchard, researchers caged some of its flowers with sticky traps. Pawpaws' maroon flowers and fetid odor suggest that flies and beetles are the plant's primary pollinators. Other plants with the same traits attract those types of insects, and growers have spotted the bugs on the trees. So far, though, the specifics of pawpaw pollinators have not been well documented in the scientific literature; the Kentucky researchers are currently analyzing insects that they have trapped from the trees and plan to publish their results in 2025. "There's certain things that we all see, we all kind of say, but then confirming them is an important thing," Pomper said.
The pollinator question is just one example of missing knowledge for an emerging crop. Without a large pool of research and data to reference, even information that seems fundamental can remain elusive. Researchers and producers have to discover the best way to plant, prune, treat, and harvest crops to ensure they can get them to consumers. For pawpaws, the lack of precedent becomes most evident when it comes time to harvest and store the fruit.
Unlike the tomato, for example, which reddens as it ripens, pawpaws don't reliably change in color as they grow — so farmers must test each pawpaw by hand to see if they give like a ready-to-eat peach. Pomper explained that developing a pawpaw cultivar with a ripening gradient would be a critical step in advancing the fruit, but plant breeding is a slow process, with cultivars taking up to 20 years to develop.
In the meantime, researchers have attempted to identify color breaks in existing pawpaws. A 2023 study co-authored by Bezalel Adainoo, a food science graduate student formerly at the University of Missouri who collaborated with Thomas, found that riper pawpaws tend to have darker skin, but noted that could result from bruising during harvesting.
This wouldn't be surprising since pawpaws are incredibly fragile. Growers can harvest many types of fruits — like apples or bananas — before they're fully ripe and then store them under specific conditions so they remain fresh until they're ready for sale, but this doesn't work for pawpaws. If harvested too early, they'll never fully mature. And once they're ripe, they become unappetizing fast.
Like peaches or pears, pawpaws produce ethylene, a hormone that causes the fruit to soften and brown. The fruit stays fresh at room temperature for about three days after picking. A 2008 study found that storing the fruit around 40 degrees Fahrenheit can preserve pawpaws for about four weeks, but anything longer leads to poor quality. So far, though, that has been the most successful postharvest storage technique to keep the fruit fresh.
Without a large pool of research and data to reference, even information that seems fundamental can remain elusive.
Puzzlingly, the pawpaw resists other techniques that have extended the shelf-life of even fragile foods like avocados, but researchers continue to test new methods. For example, Adainoo and his co-authors found that edible coatings — similar to those used on apples and mangoes — extended the shelf life of room-temperature pawpaws by almost two weeks. Pomper is also interested in testing whether low oxygen levels can help preserve pawpaws longer in the cold.
But Thomas, a collaborator on the edible coating project, doesn't necessarily think extending the shelf life of fresh pawpaws is the way to go. Instead, he sees a future in processing whole fresh fruits for use in other food products. "It really revolves around the processing," he said. "The pulping and the storage of the pulp."
Other crops have found great success through processed products, which keeps them available year-round. For instance, fresh cranberries only appear in stores the last few months of the year, but dried berries and juice are always in stock.
At least one small study has shown that pawpaw pulp can maintain its flavor even after months of storage, despite browning. Growers and processors can use this pulp for a variety of pawpaw products, to which consumers have responded favorably.
But developing safe, desirable products requires more than just interest. Producers also need to understand nutritional information for labeling. Robert Brannan, a food scientist at Ohio University, has been working with the USDA to add pawpaw nutrition information to their FoodData Central database for about a decade. According to Brannan, it's likely pawpaws will show up in the 2025 edition of the database, setting groundwork for more nutritional awareness and probably product development.
Processing and food safety techniques are also unrefined. Separating the skin from the pulp is still too time-consuming for a quick turnaround in large scale operations, said Pomper, who hopes to see more research into processing tools. Plus, certain types of processing, particularly drying and freeze drying, aren't safe: They leave eaters with gastrointestinal distress. It's unclear why this occurs, but growers see it as an opportunity for more research. According to Thomas: "You just need a lot of practice and people trying different equipment."
Still, there are plenty of pawpaw recipes. People have experimented with pawpaw ice cream, beer, salsa, jams, dressings, and baked goods — some with great success. That experimentation doesn't come free, though, and for an under-recognized crop like a pawpaw, the resources aren't always easy to procure.
Sometimes, crops receive a fortunate bump in public and private interest. Maybe they garner attention for purported health benefits, as did the native elderberry. Maybe they have an organized co-operative of growers, as does the cranberry. Or maybe they just have an effective rebrand, as did the kiwi — formerly called the Chinese gooseberry.
"The USDA wants to fund winners," Brannan said. "They don't want to put all this money into something and find out that it's not going to turn out to be blueberries or cranberries," two other native, formerly under-cultivated crops.
"It's really easy to get swept up in the hype around certain crops."
Crop funding in the U.S. tends to elevate large commodity crops like corn and soybeans. While the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture sets aside roughly $75 million in grant money specifically allotted for specialty crop research, that makes up less than 4 percent of the institute's budget.
In an email to Undark, Jessica Shade, a national program leader with NIFA, wrote that projects focused on emerging crops can struggle to compete for grant funding if they don't have much preliminary research to draw from. However, emerging crops can stand a chance: Shade wrote that 14 percent of funded projects from 2019 to 2023 focused on unique crops.
Some crops might also find funding successes through industry groups. Although organizations like the Northern Nut Growers Association have funded pawpaw research in the past, new crops simply lack the resources of a multi-billion-dollar industry, like the one for apples. Plus, privately funded research risks conflicts of interest that can threaten the integrity of the data.
However, caution toward investing in new crops can be reasonable: "It's really easy to get swept up in the hype around certain crops," Mirsky said. He, along with other experts, brought up the frenzy around hemp, whose production has declined in recent years due to regulatory challenges. Governments and growers over-invested in the crop without having a steady market, leading to a huge loss of money. "It's a perfect example of under-realistic enthusiasm," Pomper said.
So far, Osatuke says she hasn't seen people over-invest in pawpaws the way they have with other crops. If anything, she said, pawpaw hype tends to come from consumers and media more than growers themselves. Pomper agreed, noting that the growth seems healthy: "Pawpaw continues to just kind of keep on going up."
Indeed, as more researchers begin to study pawpaws — focusing on agroforestry, food science, and operations management — other entities continue to push the crop. Organizations like the North American Pawpaw Growers Association hope to educate growers and consumers alike about the fruit. Next year, the fifth International PawPaw Conference will gather experts to discuss the future of the fruit.
"Pawpaw continues to just kind of keep on going up."
"This is a really good time to be working on these kinds of crops," Mirsky said, noting the increasing interest and availability of resources for non-mainstream plants
Still, Peterson, now in his fifth decade of breeding pawpaws, doubts he'll see fresh fruits available in large chain stores in his lifetime. And he doesn't necessarily hope to, he said, which "makes me a bit of a heretic." While he believes the industry will probably move in the direction of processing, he sees nothing wrong with enjoying the pawpaw as a seasonal fruit that lies outside the system of mass distribution and consumption.
But those in the pawpaw community can't help but aim higher, including Pomper: "Many of us are kind of bitten with the pawpaw bug."
Lily Stewart is a freelance science writer and former editorial intern at Undark. Her work has also appeared in Environmental Health News and Great Lakes Now.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
