How Panruti's GI-tagged jackfruit has travelled from farms to gourmet tables

Panruti is about 4 hours by road from Chennai. While Tripura and Kerala are better known for their scale of production, Panruti is one of the few places in India where jackfruit is cultivated as a commercial monocrop. It’s also the only place in the country where jackfruit is available 365 days a year. Here, giant jackfruits dangle from almost every tree, and the sweet aroma of ripe palapazham, as the jackfruit is known in Tamil, fills the air.

Once dismissed as the “poor man’s food” and eaten purely for sustenance, today jackfruits have become a culinary superstar of sorts, prized as mock meat, cocktail flavouring, an ingredient in health foods and an export commodity. It has also entered gourmet cooking as an ingredient to make jackfruit haleem, vindaloo tacos, Mysore Pak, Kadgi curry, vegan burgers, Goan xacuti and galouti kebabs.

In Panruti, the secret behind these enormous sizes is a cultivation practice known as thinning. Farmers call it “family planning for jackfruits”, where they allow only a single fruit to develop on each stalk, ensuring that all the nutrients are channelled into that one fruit. The result is a massive jackfruit with thick, fleshy, extra sweet carpels, which jackfruit vendors on pushcarts and mini-vans advertise as the coveted “Panruti Special” variety. In 2025, the Panruti jackfruit was awarded a Geographical Indication (GI) tag in recognition of its distinctive aroma, creamy texture and sweet taste.

The fruit itself has much older roots. Jackfruit is native to the forests of the Western Ghats, where it still grows wild, before gradually spreading to other regions through human cultivation. It may also have been carried downhill by elephants, eventually reaching the Cuddalore plains. The seeds, protected by a tough, plastic-like coating, often survive the journey through the elephant’s digestive tract. Deposited in dung, they can germinate wherever they fall.

For all its abundance though, jackfruit has never been an easy fruit to love. It’s bulky, ungainly and intimidating in size, and it demands patience. Before cutting a fruit open, hands and knives must be coated with oil—coconut in some regions, mustard in others—to keep the thick, sticky sap from clinging to everything it touches and turning fingers and surfaces black. Yet beneath the spiky exterior lies one of the most nutritious fruits in the tropics.

Across India, all jackfruit belong to the same species—Artocarpus heterophyllus. What varies is the type. “It’s very much like people,” says Shree Padre, editor of the Kannada farm magazine Adike Patrike, which has published over 30 cover stories on jackfruit in an attempt to shift the fruit’s image to a mainstream, profitable agricultural commodity. “Like people, one is tall, another is lean, another is fat. One is sweet, another is rude,” he says with a laugh. The difference lies in the texture of the flesh, or carpel. Some varieties are soft, mushy and melts in the mouth, while others are firm and crisp. “In Assam, around 70% of the jackfruit has soft flesh, and it’s much the same in Kerala,” says Padre. “But in low-rainfall regions like Panruti and Tumkur, soft-fleshed varieties are rare.”

What also works for Panruti is the red soil that’s excellent for growing jackfruits and cashews. The only exception is when heavy rains leave the plantation waterlogged, diluting the sweetness of the fruit. Traditional jackfruit varieties in the region produce fruit once a year. Flowering usually occurs from mid-November to mid-February. Tender jackfruit is available in the market from March to August, while ripe fruits are harvested from June onward.

A. Susaimari, 75, has traded in jackfruit for more than four decades. He runs the Andavar Jackfruit Godown, one of Panruti’s oldest wholesale businesses.

It is a hot Thursday morning in June. The temperature is pushing the high 30s as small and giant jackfruits lie stacked in mounds around Susaimari’s godown, forming little hills of green, spiky fruit. They rest on a bed of sand beneath a thatched roof, watched over by framed images of Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary and Jesus, alongside a sticker of former Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin.

Susaimari doesn’t think it matters how Panruti became the Jack-HQ and who that first farmer was who thought growing jackfruit was a good idea. It simply evolved over generations. “Jackfruit did not come from somewhere else. It belongs to our ooru (land),” he says. “Every other family has been growing it, so why trace the first person? Someone started it, and it has continued ever since,” Susaimari says. “Jackfruit is generational wealth!”

Susaimari owns 200 trees on four acres of land. He is preoccupied this morning. His accountant is on leave, and he is hurrying to the bank when two jackfruit farmers carry their fruits into his godown for a quick sale. Money exchanges hands. Depending on whether the season has just begun or is at its peak, each fruit fetches between ₹150-500. Susaimari removes two sweat-stained ₹200 notes and hands it to the farmer. Annually, he sees a profit of ₹2-2.5 lakh for every 100 trees.

During the peak harvest months especially in April and May, Panruti’s wholesale mandi sees hot sales. On average, 200-300 metric tonnes of jackfruit is traded here every day. Usually, a tonne is 100 fruits. From these mandis, truckloads head to bordering states of Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and as far away as Mumbai. They get resold in wholesale mandis there before being purchased by neighbourhood fruit vendors. In Mumbai, it is so popular, say Panruti’s farmers, that the fruit gets sold out as soon as the lorries carrying them park on the street.

Much has changed though since Susaimari first entered the jackfruit trade. Today, sales happen online. Buyers inspect the fruit over video calls before giving their approval. Once the deal is struck, each jackfruit is marked with a number on its stalk and dispatched to wholesale markets across the country.

But the big challenge is keeping the jackfruits cool at the godown. Jackfruit generates heat as they ripen, and traders watch for the telltale dark rings that appear around the spikes. “It’s hot enough just sitting around them,” says Susaimari. That is why his godown has a thatched roof, a floor layered with sand, and openings at both ends to allow constant cross-ventilation. Keeping the fruits cool is essential to slowing spoilage. If they begin to rot, unlike their long-living cashew counterparts, their value starts to drop. Then they become cattle and chicken feed. Farmers joke that the dogs have shiny skin during the season from eating the fruit.

Susaimari was seven when he first tasted jackfruit. “When I was young, my family ate jackfruit to quash hunger, not to enjoy its taste,” he recalls. His mother would slice the flesh of unripe jackfruit and cook it with spices to make a meal. That is the beauty of the jackfruit, the fruit changes dramatically as it matures, and each stage has its own culinary use. There is the tender jackfruit, cooked as a vegetable; the slightly mature fruit, whose seeds are still soft and sweet; the unripe green jackfruit, used to make flour; the fully ripe fruit, eaten fresh as a dessert; and finally, the seeds, which are cooked and eaten on their own.

“Nowadays, people do all kinds of things with jackfruit,” Susaimari says. “They dip the ripe fruit in honey. I recently went to a wedding where they blended ripe jackfruit with lemon and served it as a juice.”

Ironically, jackfruit is no longer part of Susaimari’s diet. He chalks it down to boredom that comes from seeing it every day but it is also because he is diabetic. In recent years, though, jackfruit, particularly the unripe fruit, has attracted scientific interest for its potential role in blood sugar management. This has spawned a growing market for green jackfruit flour, which can be mixed into dosa or idli batter, kneaded into chapati dough, or even stirred into coffee as powder.

One of the best known examples is Jackfruit365 Green Jackfruit Flour for Diabetes developed in 2016 by a Kerala techie turned jack-preneur, James Joseph. The product, now sold on Amazon, has been scientifically evaluated in clinical studies. One randomised study done at the Government Medical College in Srikakulam in 2017 using Jackfruit365 showed a reduction in blood glucose levels over seven days when compared with a control group. Some studies have also explored its positive effects on reducing blood pressure, cholesterol, and fatty liver disease. Susaimari has heard of the powdered flour but hasn’t tried it himself.

LIVING HISTORY

Five kilometres from Susaimari’s godown is the village of Maligampattu, home to jackfruit farmer S. Ramasamy. In his thottam (plantation) stands the 250-year-old Aayiramkachi, a large handsome tree bearing fruit till its base. Ramasamy, 72, played a key role in securing the GI Tag for Panruti’s jackfruit. The proof is on his wall, the GI certificate is framed and displayed for all to see.

Like many in the region, Ramasamy’s life has been inseparable from jackfruit. For two decades, he ran a wholesale mandi, dispatching truckloads of fruit to Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Mysuru. “I used to send unripe jackfruits to hotels in Madras,” he recalls. “They’d make biryani with them. We’d harvest the fruit when it was not fully ripe and load it on to the lorry immediately.”

Most jackfruit farmers and traders in Panruti know their fruit travels far and wide. Beyond that, its journey is a mystery. They rarely know what chefs in fancy restaurants eventually make with it. But Ramasamy and his wife Chandrakala have been conducting their own home-based experiments. They have a cookbook written by a Panruti resident containing 150 jackfruit recipes, organised according to the fruit’s different stages of ripeness, as it transforms from vegetable to dessert.

“You can make vada, bajji, poriyal (stir fry), oorugai (pickle), cutlets, chutney, sundal, upma, avial, halwa...” Chandrakala rattles off. “Jackfruit bajji (jackfruit coated with a chickpea batter and fried) is on par with egg bajji,” chips in Ramasamy. Unlike her husband, Chandrakala did not grow up eating jackfruit. It was a specialty of her in-laws’ home. “I got married in 1983, and since then I’ve eaten jackfruit every single year. When I got married, I was still eating the carpels when my husband returned home from a day’s work. That’s how big the fruit was,” she giggles. “Nobody can say they don’t like palapazham.”

Over the years, Ramasamy has become something of a jackfruit ambassador by speaking about the fruit across south India. A research team from Kerala once visited Maligampattu to study his cultivation techniques, watching him demonstrate the thinning method. The careful cultivation also allows fruits to grow lower and closer to the trunk of the tree making it easier to harvest. He has travelled to Wayanad in Kerala too, to deliver a lecture, in a state where errant jacks have killed people by falling from the sky. In April, a 57-year-old man in Kollam district tragically died after a heavy jackfruit landed on his head. Five years ago, an auto driver was injured in a similar freak accident, prompting amused internet users to nickname the accused jack: a killer kathal.

Jackfruits have invited a friendly rivalry between the two south Indian states: one that prides itself on finding endless ways to cook and eat chakka (jackfruit in Malayalam), while the other is content to indulge its massive sweet tooth with only the ripe fruit. The difference may also be cultural. In Kerala, many people including in cities, grow up with a jackfruit tree in their backyard, making the fruit a familiar part of everyday life.

“There is an old saying in Kerala, ‘If you have a jackfruit tree in your backyard, your age extends by 10 years,” says Joseph who developed Jackfruit 365. “So everybody has a jackfruit tree and it’s typically standing in the corner of your backyard where you can see it from your kitchen. It will remind you there is something you can always rely on.” In Tamil Nadu, the ripe fruit is loved so much that most people are content to buy a few pods while walking past a street vendor.

“In Tamil Nadu, we don’t have a culture of cooking with jackfruit,” says P. Haridoss, a retired senior agriculture officer in Tamil Nadu and one of the state’s most tireless champions of the fruit. Haridoss has spent years trying to change that. In May 2022, he organised a jackfruit biryani festival in his thottam to show people how the unripe fruit could be cooked and enjoyed. He speaks of the fruit with such reverence that he refers to it as “ivar”—the respectful Tamil honorific reserved for a person of stature.

“In Tamil Nadu, only a small area is under jackfruit cultivation compared with Kerala,” he says, sitting on a stone slab at Vijaya Farms, an eco-farm on the outskirts of Panruti. Above his head hangs a giant jackfruit. “Kerala has built an entire culture around processing the fruit. They make chips and many other products. In Panruti, we simply don’t have the manpower to process jackfruit into so many different forms.”

This is likely to change with a value addition centre being greenlit under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (2024-25) for Panruti at a cost of ₹16.13 crore to help jackfruit farmers increase their income by producing and exporting various value-added products of jackfruit.

Haridoss has also been instrumental in persuading Panruti’s farmers to see jackfruit as more than timber. For years, many valued the trees primarily for the wood, insisting on planting seedlings. “Until recently, their minds were fixed on the timber value rather than the fruit value,” says Shree Padre. Wood from a 40-year-old tree can fetch ₹40,000. “They were unwilling to accept grafts and preferred seedlings. Haridoss became a one-man institution, showing farmers that the income from the fruit could far exceed the value of the timber.”

At Vijaya Farms, around 30 varieties of jackfruit are quietly preparing for what is, in effect, a body-building competition for jacks. Late in June, Haridoss hosted an organoleptic evaluation. It’s the technical term for judging the fruit’s taste, texture and colour to determine the finest jackfruit among those he has cultivated.

This year, the contenders spanned a remarkable colour palette: white, light yellow, lemon yellow, strong yellow, orange, red, pink and brown. The judges included scientists, horticulture officials, retired experts, friends and jackfruit lovers. It is the first time Haridoss was organising an event like this.

“I’m testing myself as much as I’m testing the fruit,” he says. “I want to know which varieties have stable characteristics. They have to be observed continuously. If it rains, the sweetness drops. I want to identify the best candidate, the variety that can hold on to its sweetness even when the weather changes.”

Haridoss believes jackfruit has been part of the Panruti landscape for well over a millennium. He is unconvinced that Ramasamy’s tree is only 250 years old. In his view, it’s likely double that. In Panruti, the age of a jackfruit tree depends on solving the riddle: How many humans does it take to hug the trunk? Haridoss uses the hug-metric to assess that the Aayiramkachi would require at least four people. “I’ve examined the tree,” Haridoss says. “Based on its girth and the conditions of its central core, it’s definitely older. The trunk is hollow because of age and weathering. That tells me that it has been standing here for a very long time,” he says. His estimate is corroborated by Tamil Sangam poetry from 2,000 years ago. In the Kurunthokai 18, the huge ripening jackfruit is compared to a great love:

Like a small twig in which a huge fruit hangs, her life is tenuous, but her love, immense.

TO GOURMET MENUS

On a Tuesday evening on Chennai’s upscale Khader Nawaz Khan Road, bartender Vallabh Amberkar is mixing a cocktail called The Keeper’s Preserve at Roc-A-Coe.

The drink is a nod to the colonial era, when bartenders were known as “keepers” and sailors relied on preserved ingredients during long sea voyages. Into the shaker go tequila, a brined plum mix, fresh red apple juice and a touch of saline. Then comes the unexpected ingredient: brined jackfruit. It lends the drink a tropical flavour.

For Karl Fernandes, who runs the cocktail bar, jackfruit was the obvious choice. As a Goan, it was a familiar part of his childhood. In Chennai, he says, the fruit is equally familiar and easy to source. “In India, we don’t value our local ingredients enough,” Fernandes says. “We’re fascinated by olives and truffles but overlook something like jackfruit.”

The Keeper’s Preserve is a cocktail inspired by the punch houses that once lined the streets of old Madras, made with a fruit that appears on nearly every street corner in the city during summer.

That weekend, Roc-A-Coe hosted a cocktail workshop, and jackfruit was back on the menu. This time, the team was experimenting with pairing it with matcha. “The idea is to take a low-personality ingredient like jackfruit and pair it with a high-personality one like matcha,” Fernandes says. “It works really well since we did a milk wash and tropical flavours sit really well.” A milk wash removes the bitter tannins from matcha but retains the grassy umami notes and the whey from the milk pairs well with the tropical flavours of jackfruit.

Fernandes’s attempts are part of a growing trend across India of chefs and bartenders who are experimenting with a fruit that, at first glance, is anything but appealing yet is extraordinarily versatile. It’s the dual personality that is fascinating to many. When it’s young, jackfruit is mild in flavour, fibrous in texture, and remarkably adaptable. It readily absorbs marinades, spices and seasonings, becoming a blank canvas for chefs. As the fruit ripens, it transforms into something entirely different: sweet, intensely aromatic, and distinctly tropical which makes it equally compelling in desserts and cocktails.

That duality has steadily earned jackfruit a place in contemporary gourmet kitchens. Yet the fruit remains wonderfully polarising. People tend to fall into one of two camps: those who grew up loving it and those who have always been intimidated by it.

Chef Avinash Martins’ childhood summers in Goa revolved around mangoes, guavas and jackfruit. “In Konkani, we have two main types of jackfruit: rassal and kappo,” says Martins, who runs the award-winning restaurant Cavatina in Goa. “Rassal has a soft, gooey texture. We sun-dry it like a papad until it becomes chewy and almost leathery. Kappo is firmer. That’s my favourite. We used to make milkshakes with it.”

Yet it was only five years ago that Martins began taking jackfruit seriously as a culinary ingredient. “Before that, I never crossed the line of getting my hands dirty with the sap,” he says, laughing. “It’s an incredibly messy ingredient to work with.” Preparing jackfruit is an arduous task. “But the more you love an ingredient, the more trouble you’re willing to go through for it,” Martins says. “Now, I enjoy cooking with jackfruit.”

At Martins’ newly opened Bengaluru restaurant Janot, Konkani for beauty, tender jackfruit is shaped into an Udaipuri kathal galouti and served with a khooba roti, which is a jackfruit pate cake, flat bread and mathania chilli aioli. While another dish pairs pulled jackfruit with chilli hoisin sauce and sweet corn. “They are a huge hit. They are among the most popular dishes on the menu,” he says.

Hundreds of kilometres away in Gurugram, chef Chetna Chopra, is exploring a different side of the fruit. As the culinary director of OMO, a vegan-friendly restaurant, she is developing a ripe jackfruit gelato for the season. “Everyone has rediscovered young jackfruit as a meat substitute,” she says. “But ripe jackfruit is still waiting to be rediscovered simply as fruit.” Years ago, she first bit into a perfectly ripe jackfruit in Wayanad when her taxi driver insisted she stop and taste the fruit, promising it would be the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. “He wasn’t wrong. It was intensely aromatic, floral, almost custard-like, and unlike anything I had eaten before.” To Chopra, jackfruit is one of India’s most underrated ingredients. “Rather than asking how to make it imitate meat, I am more interested in treating it with the same respect we give mangoes or peaches.”

But introducing ripe jackfruit to north India, which prefers kathal or the tender jackfruit cooked as a savoury vegetable rather than eaten ripe, is a challenging task. For now, Chopra’s offers jackfruit in two dishes. The first is the Jackfruit Ghee Roast Pakwaan, inspired by the Sindhi classic dal pakwan. In place of the traditional chana dal is slow-cooked jackfruit coated in a spiced ghee roast masala, served with yogurt, kokum chutney, and a crumble of raw banana, peanuts and curry leaves. The second is a French-style Jackfruit Croquette, paired with a hyper-seasonal phalsa compote, a southern-spiced coconut salan and saffron sheermal sourdough.

Like Fernandes, Chopra feels that Indian fine dining often looks outward for inspiration, placing imported ingredients on a pedestal. “Today, many chefs are asking a different question: What already grows here, and how can we tell its story?” she says. “I always laugh when I see truffle oil being used as a shortcut to make a dish feel ‘special’, while ingredients like jackfruit, moringa, mahua or phalsa are often overlooked. I’d much rather celebrate the abundance we already have. Local is the new ‘exotic’,” she says. “I hope we begin talking about jackfruit the way we talk about mangoes. We celebrate mango varieties, debate where they come from and wait all year for the season. Jackfruit deserves that same curiosity.”

In Mumbai’s Mezcalita, a Mexican restaurant, the young jackfruit is used in tacos since the texture closely mirrors the slow-cooked filling. On Slow Tide’s menu in Goa, jackfruit is transformed into a Kadgi curry, a Sri Lankan curry prepared with young jackfruit and a base of white curry powder. “It has a mildly spiced, warm flavour with the richness of coconut milk,” says executive chef Abhishek Deshmane. “We tweaked the recipe over time; we began grilling the jackfruit with a marinade to get a char and lose excess moisture. When dunked into the curry, it absorbs all the flavours and adds a distinct smoky aroma to the dish.” Slow Tide also offers Smoked Jackfruit Mude, Anglo-Indian Jackfruit Vindaloo Tostada, Xacuti Jackfruit Fritters, and the newest addition to the monsoon menu, Kadgi Urandai Seekh with Saaru.

At Mumbai’s Slink and Bardot restaurant, executive chef Aliakbar Baldiwala agrees that jackfruit tends to inspire strong opinions. “It’s one of those ingredients that people either absolutely love or are initially hesitant about. Interestingly, guests who are unsure about jackfruit on paper often change their minds after trying it,” he says. “Our Jackfruit 65 Bao, for instance, often surprises guests because it delivers all the satisfaction and bold seasoning they associate with familiar comfort food.” But where reactions become more divided is with ripe jackfruit. “We pair ripe jackfruit with our goat’s cheesecake dessert, and while many guests enjoy the contrast and tropical character it brings, others find the sweetness quite pronounced. That’s the beauty of jackfruit, it has a very strong personality and doesn’t try to be universally appealing.”