History of the Pineapple

Pineapples, or Ananas comosus in their botanical name, are native to South America, and were named after the resemblance to a pine cone, and the taste of the flesh being similar to an apple's. We have to go back to 1398 to find the first printed reference to its similarity to a pine cone, and the term pinappel to define it only appeared in print three centuries later, in 1664.

History states that it was discovered by Christopher Columbus on the island of Guadalupe in 1493, during his exploration of the Caribbean, who called it piña de Indes, or "pine of the Indies". He brought some of them back to Spain as a gift for Queen Isabella, who apparently was very fond of them, since Spaniards tried to cultivate them (albeit with little success).

Guarani and Tupi Indians (in South America) had already cultivated pineapples for centuries, and they called them "nana'" or "anana'", literally meaning "excellent fruit".

Magellan is also credited with finding pineapple plants in Brazil, in 1519, and their popularity spread very fast, leading to pineapples being spread to England in 1555, and later exported to India, West Indies and Asia.

In the Victorian Era, it became an icon of hospitality after seafaring captains placed fresh pineapples on their gateposts to signify the man of the house was a home and receiving guest.

Several references can be found in literature regarding George Washington and his fondness for pineapples: after tasting them in Barbados in 1751, he declared them his favorite tropical fruit. Despite this early success, and even though there was no shortage of plants in Florida, pineapples were still a rarity for the majority of Americans.

Today, when we think of pineapples we think of Hawaii: it was Captain James Cook to introduce them to Hawaii in 1770, but their cultivation was still not economically feasible due to the high transportation costs.

When steamships solved the problem, commercial cultivation finally began around a century later, in 1880.

An Englishman, Captain John Kidwell, successfully canned pineapple first in the late 1800, but was unable to make selling canned pinapples a profitable business due to the high tariffs collected by the United States and closed his business in 1898.

James Drummond Dole holding a pineapple

In that same year, Hawaii became part of the United States, and the high tariffs were removed. In 1900, James Drummond Dole went to Hawaii with a thousand dollars, degrees in business and agriculture, and a dream of growing and canning pineapples. In 1901, he founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Co. and began canning the pinapple in 1903, making it easily accessible worldwide. Production costs were still high though, and remained so until an ingenuous engineer, Henry Ginaca, invented a machine in 1911 that could remove the outer shell, inner core and both ends of 100 pineapples in less than a minute. The machine is still used today and is known as the "Ginaca machine".

By 1921 the Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company was a flourishing business, making pineapple Hawaii's largest crop and industry.

Nowadays Hawaii produces only ten percent of the world's pineapples and many other countries cultivate them all over the world, including: Mexico, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Philippines, Thailand, Costa Rica, China, and Asia.