The 9 Largest Fruits in the World

It’s hard to beat the taste of a refreshing piece of fruit, especially on a hot summer day! Whether you like juicy watermelon, crisp apples, or plump blueberries, including plenty of these goodies in your diet can be incredibly beneficial. While fruit often looks the same from one grocery store to another, organic harvests can result in impressive outcomes. Let’s take a look at the heaviest and largest fruits in the world!

Pumpkin

Pumpkin is rich in vitamins and antioxidants. There’s no denying that this fall favorite is large, and among the heaviest fruits in the world. Just ask any parent who’s ever carted one around a pumpkin patch!

However, learning how big pumpkins can get may shock you!

Carlos Perez established the national record in Spain back in 2003 when he grew a pumpkin weighing 1,034 pounds! A record like this is hard to break, and it held for over a decade. However, in 2016, Shirley Oliver broke the record with her 1,116-pound South Africa pumpkin. Shockingly, another pumpkin weighing 1,986 pounds was grown by Matthias Wuersching in Germany the same year. But the year was not over.

In 2016, a Belgian man named Mathias Willemijns raised an enormous Atlantic pumpkin, known to be the largest species of fruit in the world, that weighed 2,625 pounds! This specimen broke the previous world record for the heaviest pumpkin; it also holds the title of Belgium’s largest fruit.

Apple

Japan generated the biggest apple in the world in 2005. The apple, which Chisato Iwasaki found, weighed 4 pounds, 1 ounce. A hybrid of the Mutsu and Fuji, the Hokuto apple is a spherical, golden fruit with pink stripes. It was harvested in the middle of the season.

Jackfruit

Did you know jackfruit is often used as a meat substitute? It may sound strange, but it makes a tasty savory dish.

India produced the heaviest jackfruit in the world, measuring 52 inches in circumference and weighing 94.18 pounds. This jackfruit was a whopping 22.5 inches long!  

Jackfruit is a typical fruit found in the Philippines, India, Southeast Asia, and central and eastern Africa. Moreover, it enjoys great popularity in Suriname and Brazil. This fruit turns from bright green to yellow as it ripens, similar to lemons and limes. The fruit is resistant to drought, disease, and pests, and is rich in iron, calcium, and potassium. Remarkably, the fig tree and the jackfruit tree belong to the same family.

Lemon

These normally small fruits made the list when Israeli farmer Aharon Shemoel grew a massive lemon in 2003. The lemon was 13.7 inches tall and had a circumference of 29 inches. This lemon, which developed in a pairing with another large lemon, weighed roughly 11.6 pounds.

Lemon juice is a common ingredient in sweets and pastries. In addition, lemons are used all over the world to enhance a variety of vegetables, fish, and poultry cuisines.

Watermelon

Like pumpkins, watermelons are a common fruit with an average size that is quite massive. Afterall, we don’t make pregnancy jokes about smuggling watermelons for no reason! But even fully developed watermelons are small enough to fit in your cart at the grocery store. Aren’t they?

Chris Kent from the United States produced a 350.5-pound watermelon in 2013 that was the largest ever recorded. He accomplished this feat by using seeds from the Carolina Cross variety. These seeds are soaked in water for an hour before being planted in potting soil indoors. Seeds sprout after roughly three to four days, before being moved outside.

Banana

It’s safe to assume you didn’t expect to see bananas on a list of the largest fruit ever recorded. Although they are not huge, bananas grow within a wide range of sizes. Additionally, though the individual bananas may be quite normal in size, the bunches themselves can be enormous!

The largest bunch of bananas was grown in 2001 by Spanish companies Tecorone SL and Kabana SA. The bunch weighed 287 pounds and contained roughly 473 bananas!

Banana leaves are used in a number of countries, like Mexico, to wrap tamales. Additionally, they are used in several regions of Asia for sticky rice. Banana peels have also been used as an antibacterial and anti-inflammatory to promote wound healing.

Strawberry

Most of us assume strawberries wouldn’t be on a list of hefty fruit. Afterall, the strawberry is tiny enough to fit in your palm several times over. But some strawberries are far larger!

Anthony Snell of Herefordshire handpicked a large strawberry on his produce field on June 17, 2016. The massive berry was 0.19 pounds. It was the largest strawberry ever cultivated in Herefordshire. However, the largest strawberry in the world was produced in Japan. When he came upon an unusually large strawberry during harvesting, Mr. Koji Nakao approached Guinness World Records. 

The fruit measured 3.15 inches in height and weighed slightly more than half a pound. Unexpectedly, the huge strawberry was a mutation. Several berries had merged to create a single, giant strawberry.

Mango

A luscious mango, which was cultivated in Guayatá, Colombia, by farmers Reina Maria Marroqun and Germán Orlando Novoa Barrera, was larger than an average newborn human!

In July 2020, it was weighed and found to be 9.36 pounds, shattering the old record of 7.57 pounds held for more than 10 years by a Filippino mango. For comparison, a typical mango only weighs five to seven ounces.

Eggplant

Commonly thought of as vegetables, you might be taken aback by an aubergine appearing on this list. But because they include seeds and come from a flowering plant, eggplants are considered a type of fruit. In fact, eggplants are considered berries by botanical definition! This is because they match the requirements for having a single flower with one ovary, a delicate outer skin, and a fleshy center that contains the seeds.

A large eggplant from the United Kingdom’s Peter Glazebrook’s Farm was declared the biggest in history at the 2021 CANNA UK National Giant Vegetables (and fruits) Championships. It weighed three ounces more than the prior record-holder and measured six pounds,14 ounces. 

Final Thoughts

While it’s rare to see such large pumpkins, strawberries, and lemons, we hope you learned that fruits are capable of growing to extreme proportions!

The photo featured at the top of this post is © Anna-Nas/Shutterstock.com