The rise of custard-flavored fruit

The rise of the fruit that tastes like vanilla sauce

Ashoka Shivareddy comes from a peasant family, but it was difficult to earn his livelihood in her drought-prone district of Kolar in southern India. “In the area, only 60 to 70 centimeters of precipitation fall, and farmers dig wells with a length of up to 1,300 feet – most of their money flows into the search for water,” he says. In view of increasing losses, the family gave up agriculture, moved to the city in 2005 – to Bengaluru – and opened a vegetable store. Shivareddy became an AI software engineer, but he never lost interest in agriculture. In 2018, he decided to revive family business, but with a more scientific approach. “I was looking for a plant with very little water, growing with rain and not heavily dependent on pesticides,” he explains. Vanilla pudding seemed good to fit. A nubble fruit of the size of a large avocado, whose creamy, sweet flesh tastes a little after vanilla sauce – therefore the name. Pudding apple trees grow wild in the area of Shivareddy and the locals harvested the fruits and sold them on the market. Shivareddy was very promising. To maximize its yield, he planted trees closer together than typical farms. Shivareddy has also carefully selected three varieties, each with different advantages. The approach seems to work. “Last year I produced about 20 tonnes. This year is about 25 tons. There is a great demand for pudding apples in India and abroad,” he says. While pudding apples can survive under dry conditions, there are some challenges when growing. The traditional Balangar variety has a very short shelf life, sometimes only three or four days, which limits the farmer's sales possibilities. It also contains many seeds, making it less attractive to the customer. “Traditional varieties have an excellent taste, but suffer from a low pulp content, a high number of seeds and a very poor shelf life,” says Dr. Sakthivel T, senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research (IIHR) in Bangalore. His team developed a hybrid fruit called Arka Sahan, which can survive a week at room temperature and has fewer seeds and more pulp. Over the past 20 years, this variety has spread throughout southern India. “The transition from a 30-percent crop production in wild varieties to a 70-percent extraction in hybrids such as Arka Sahan has effectively doubled the usable harvest for farmers without requiring more land,” says Sakthivel. His team is now looking for better ways to process the fruit and extract the pulp so that it can be used more frequently in processed foods such as ice cream and milk shakes. One problem that they are trying to fix is that the pulp of vanilla pudding apples becomes very fast brown after extraction. Researchers at the IIHR experiment with new devices and techniques to help pudding apple brand retain its milky color longer. The central Indian state of Maharashtra is the leading producer of pudding apples and accounts for almost a third of national production. Navnath Malhari Kaspate has been growing fruits there for decades. He traveled through India, collected seeds and brought them back to his farm where he crumbed them. “No one had really dealt with pudding apples or did research, so I decided to continue working on it. It takes 12 to 15 years to develop a new variety. This is not a fast work – there are decades of experiments,” he says. His work led to the strain NMK-01 (named after his initials) known for their high yield. It was traded in 2014. “We are now relying on nearly 50 Acres vanilla pudding apples, with a yield of about 10 tons per Acre. This improved variety that does not spoil has created opportunities for export. We have begun to export to the Gulf States, and have even sent them to Europe, which had never existed in this order,” he says. Kaspate's development work continues, he is currently working on a variety with improved appearance and greater disease resistance. Manoj Kumar Barai exports NMK-01 to the USA, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Europe. “For export we prefer the variety NMK-01 because it has a better durability, a thicker shell, more flesh and a sweeter taste than others,” he says. Nevertheless, the export of such a sensitive fruit requires a complicated process. “We need to plan everything exactly – harvest time, transport to packages, airport transfer, flights, customs clearance – every hour counts.”

Temperature control is crucial. “Pudding apples are very heat-sensitive and even a short impact can reduce their durability,” he says. Road trips are often carried out overnight to avoid the worst heat. “In regions such as Maharashtra, temperatures can reach up to 40 degrees, and even during transport they can reach 30–35 degrees, which is not ideal for this fruit.”

The fruits are precooled for five hours before they are packaged and transported into cooling transporters and then stored in cooling rooms before they are sent by air freight. In order to protect and keep the fruit cool, special cardboard boxes were developed from corrugated cardboard. More and more fruits are exported as pulp or powder form, which is a “revolution” for the export industry, says Barai. Fruit meat is used by foreign ice producers, bakeries and “Pulp-Shot” cafes. It is still not easy because the pulp has to be stored and transported at -18 °C. But it is still cheaper than air freight and allows the transport of large quantities over weeks without the need to waste fruit. Back in Kolar, Shivareddy wants to expand its business by selling fruit and whole apples. He plans to build a pulp processing plant that evaluates the part of his harvest that he cannot sell. But extracting the pulp and cooling to -20 °C requires considerable investment in the equipment which, in his opinion, will bring a change in their way of thinking for many farmers. “Pudding apples are in a strange gap. Demand increases, but cultivation has not changed to high-tech, as the plant is naturally robust. It grows on karogenic soils, needs only very little water and lives on rainfall. Farmers do not need expensive irrigation, sensors or controlled environments, so the acceptance of technology remains low,” he says. This article was published on 27 November. May 2026 updated to add a health warning to pudding apple kernels and fruit-based food supplements.