You can ‘improve’ any natural product by selective breeding and other methods. But opw do you make it more marketable? The pineapple industry’s historical leader, Del Monte, is experimenting with new colours – and flavours…
The Rubyglow pineapple costs (US)$395. Against all odds, and common-sense expectations, it sells out lightning fast wherever it’s offered. Because it’s dif-ferent, it’s exotic and it’s ultra-rare.
It’s just one new colour of pineapple Del Monte has produced, along with Pink-glow (pictured left). Pinkglow is more plentiful and currently much more af-fordable… But still priced around $10 to $15 each.
The new breed pf pineapple is seling to fruit aficionados – and the the catering industry, which is always looking for something new to offer top-end clients.
The way of the future?
According to Food Dive, “the [Rubyglow] pineapple takes two years to mature and is grown in a trop-ical rainforest in Costa Rica to help its flavor and quality. Only a few thousand of the pineapples are produced each year.”
And pineapple pioneer Del Monte is hoping the Rubyglow will help cement a more-diverse, more-profitable future.
“Retailers are looking to revitalize what is kind of a mature [pineapple] category. There hasn’t really been, up until probably the last couple of years, a lot of new development,” Bill Goldfield, Director of Corporate Communications at Dole, says. “There is a gap in the market and we’re looking to fill it.”
Pinkglow, which débuted on the market in 2023,m was an instant hit. Overall, sales of premium pine-apples drove a historic 26 percent year-over-year increase in the company’s gross profit in 2025.
Flavour innovations…
Fresh Del Monte is also revolutionizing pineapple flavour variety. And that is making a certain sub-group of consumers very happy. My Mom always said she loved Pineapple, but it was just tok sweet for her to emjoy more than a few bites at a sitting. She used to water down the juice when she served it for dessert. I’ve heard other folks say much the same thing.
According to the grower, Rubyglow pineapples feature, ‘a distinct sweet flavor’, that’s less cloying than regular varieties’. On the other hand, Del Monte notes, breeding a sweeter pineapple is much easier…
Broad-spectrum developments
Fresh Del Monte launched Precious Honeyglow this past March. It’s a tiny, perfect verion of the com-pany’s famous Golden Sweet pineapple. They marketed it as a ‘single-serving solution’, and touted the item as a way to reduce food waste…
Del Monte also improved its industry’s sustainability, introducing carbon-neutral pineapples in 2022.
Why the push?
The pineapple sector was getting slaughtered by a couple of other fresh fruit domains over the first two decades of the new Millennium. Remember the flood of new apple varieties that arrived on the market? Like Honeycrisp? And there was a resurgence of popularity in formerly obscure (here in the West) citrus fruits such as ruby Red grapefruit, tangellos, pomellos, kumquats, Meyer lemons and Key limes.
Future-gazing Del Monte execs saw they were fighting a losing battle in an age of exploding produce diversity. And they responded with an aggressive, all-in rsponse to ‘the inevitable’.
My take
Developing fruits and veggies with new colours and flavours isn’t new. Carrot growers have been do-ing it for over a decade – bringing back legacy red, yellow, blue and purple varieties, and ‘improving’ them to maximize their appeal to younger, more-demanding consumers.
But Del Monte’s aggressive approach to pineapple evolution is unique. And it’s been undertaken at great effort and expense to ensure that the traditional favioutite isn’t eclypsed by some upstart com-petitor.
Fresh Del Monte and it’s corporate predecessors have been growing – and promoting – pineapples for 118 years. And plan to enjoy a good business out of them for another hundred years, at least…
~ Maggie J.