Pineapple season by country

Year-round, firming through the Northern Hemisphere winter. Another programme rather than a season.

Pineapples are chilling-sensitive in a way most reefer cargo is not: run the container too cold and internal browning develops that is invisible until the fruit is cut. On this product the setpoint is a bigger risk than the calendar.

Every week of the year. Costa Rica is the largest pineapple exporter in the world by a wide margin, and MD2 out of the Caribbean lowlands is what most of Europe eats.

There is no season to plan around, so the questions worth asking are about the container rather than the calendar. Pineapple is chilling-sensitive: too cold and internal browning develops that is invisible until the fruit is cut, which is a claim that arrives weeks after the container did.

Year-round from the plantations in Bukidnon and South Cotabato, on the same standing-programme model as the bananas beside them. The Philippines is the largest pineapple exporter in Asia and one of the largest anywhere.

Most of that volume is not this trade. The bulk of the Philippine crop is canned, juiced or dried, and the fresh export programme is a smaller subset of it sold into Japan, Korea and China. Worth knowing when a headline production figure is quoted at you: it describes a cannery, not the fruit in a reefer.

Year-round, out of the Central and Eastern regions and shipping through Tema. Ghana’s recent history is the clearest example on this calendar of what a variety switch does to an origin: it built a European trade on Smooth Cayenne and lost most of it when the market moved to MD2 and Costa Rica was already growing it at scale.

What exists now is smaller and deliberately different — MD2 alongside the sugarloaf varieties Costa Rica does not supply — and it competes on days rather than on price. Tema to Northern Europe is inside a fortnight, which is what lets a Ghanaian pineapple be sold on how recently it was cut.

Year-round, and a much smaller trade than it once was. Ivory Coast supplied most of Europe’s fresh pineapple before MD2 and Costa Rica took the market, and what remains is a differentiated programme — MD2 plus the small, aromatic Queen Victoria — rather than a volume one.

The risk on both Ivorian rows is ashore rather than at sea. Abidjan handles most of the region’s containers and has no near substitute, so a strike or a disruption at the port removes a week of shipping that nothing at the farm end recovers.