In the fruit section of a high-end supermarket in New Cairo, Hamed Abdallah is busy slicing up a selection of fruit for one of his customers.
A quarter of a red watermelon, four Hindi mangoes, three white dragon fruits, and five green kiwis. “Buying fruit has been changing in Egypt in many ways,” Abdallah said. People are becoming more economically aware, for one thing, he added.
“Whether they are living on a budget or not, people are a lot more mindful about avoiding waste. This is something that I often hear from clients here and when I worked in a wholesale supermarket in the city,” Abdallah said.
Nadia Ahmed, who was waiting to get her fruit, agreed. However, she added that it is not only about “conscious shopping but also about the changing style of shopping.”
She said that with a much bigger variety of fruit available, especially summer fruit, in order to get a good selection, one has to buy smaller quantities. “Before it was different, as at this time of the year, you would get a big watermelon and two or three kg of mangoes, and that would be it. But now things are different. The variety is bigger, and almost everything is available all year long,” she said.
In addition to boxes of sliced fruit, Ahmed’s shopping included a box of blackberries, a box of passion fruit, and a box of black raisins and a few bananas. She calculated that the watermelon, the bananas, and mangoes were each a kg in weight, while the rest was a quarter of a kg each, “more than enough for two days to three days” for a family of four, she added.
Ahmed said that she does her fruit shopping twice a week and that each week she picks a different selection, “except for the watermelons and mangoes which are the summer fruits for our family.”
And every time, she said, she includes two or three items of the tropical fruits that have been increasingly taking space at the supermarket she frequents. “They are healthy and taste good, and most importantly they are homegrown,” she added.
The only summer fruit that Ahmed was missing in the supermarket were the “tasty strawberries and melons that used to have such a distinct odour that you could smell them even before you got into the house. I can’t find those anyway today, even at the local fruit vendors in Heliopolis where I used to live,” she said.
Mohamed Fathi, a professor of agriculture at Cairo University, said that while “there has been a big leap forward in the diversity of fruit available in Egypt, some varieties have become less distinct.” The issue, he argued, is not related to the introduction of a large selection of tropical fruit to farms and markets — with around 12 new types of fruit having made it to the local market over the past 10 to 20 years — but instead to the parameters of production.
“Farming over the past few decades, way before the introduction of tropical fruit, has been increasingly oriented towards increasing productivity and shelf life,” he explained.
“The old varieties of strawberries were unique in terms of taste and smell, but the varieties currently grown provide four times the amount of crop per feddan and have a much longer shelf life. That makes them more suitable for the current shopping patterns and above all for exports, which is now a number one objective for almost every farmer, not to mention the government,” Fathi said.
Mahmoud Raafat, a senior production and operations manager at a leading agriculture business in Egypt, said that when strawberries were first introduced to Egypt it took a while for the fruit to develop into what became known as the small and sweet Egyptian strawberries.
“It is perfectly normal for new varieties to come in and for other varieties to take a step back. The market is an essential part of the changes in the agriculture scene,” Raafat said.
This also holds for other fruit besides strawberries and melons, among the most prominent summer fruits in Egypt in the second and third quarters of the last century. Grapes and bananas have also seen the introduction of new and diverse varieties and the receding of others.
It is also an established fact that with the exception of some very long-established kinds of fruit that Egypt has known for thousands of years, most summer or winter fruit was originally brought to the country from abroad.
NEW FRUIT: Farmers have been learning to plant berries, dragon fruit, passion fruit, and other kinds of fruit that have been introduced into Egypt on a wide scale over the past few decades.
However, this is not a first since during the rule of Mohamed Ali in the early 19th century, Egyptian farmers learned how to grow the mangoes that were then brought over from India.
“Mangoes are a tropical fruit, and it is hard to contest the taste and quality of some varieties of Egyptian mangoes even if they are compared to the mangoes cultivated in India. What we have today are Egyptian varieties that have been selected to fit the Egyptian soil, water, and weather,” Fathi said.
“During the past 20 years or so, Egypt has also been introduced to new varieties of mango that are more suitable for reclaimed land and need less irrigation,” he added.
Fathi said that while older varieties like the Ewais and Alfonce mangoes “that carry the names of those who first introduced them to the country” remain favourites on the local market, the newer varieties are more fit for exports given that they have a longer shelf life.
“The same thing applies to watermelons, bananas, and other fruit,” he added.
Fruit is among Egypt’s top agricultural exports, and during the first quarter of this year, fresh fruit exports came close to $1 billion. A source at the Ministry of Agriculture said that while oranges, mangoes, strawberries, and grapes remain top exports items, there has been an increase in the export of some of the newly introduced fruit, especially blueberries, some of the seedless varieties of melons and watermelons, and peaches.
The government is strongly encouraging the introduction of fruit that can expand the volume of agricultural exports and help enlarge the capacity of Egypt’s food industries, especially jams and juices, the source said. He added that in the coming period there will be a serious focus on the future of agricultural planning, with an eye on increasing exports and lowering prices in the local market.
There is room to expand and build on “the success story that has been secured with fruit exports”.
“There have been some significant success stories on this front, especially with avocados and some varieties of grapes, and our business has secured larger exports,” Raafat said. “We are pulling ahead with berries, and many other businesses have also been making progress, especially as Egyptian farmers have been making remarkable progress with cultivation techniques that allow for a final product that can compete in the international market both in terms of taste and shelf life,” he added.
According to Nader Noureldin, a professor of water resources and agriculture at Cairo University, the introduction of new varieties of fruit to Egypt, including tropical fruit, is still experimental, given the amount of land dedicated to these when compared to longer-established kinds.
He added that while it is hard to predict the success of the exercise in the long term, so far it has been in line with agricultural parameters that require maximum water conservation and high potential for exports.
“Cash crops are perfectly legitimate. The government is pushing for an increase in exports to secure the foreign currency needed to export more strategic crops like wheat that are limited due to the hot weather,” Noureldin said.
Ahmed Mahmoud and Fady Shahid, who work for farms that allocate significant attention to tropical fruit and other export fruit, argued that Egypt has an edge that allows for its fresh fruit to make it to markets in the Gulf and Europe.
This edge includes Egypt’s central location that allows for prompt and relatively inexpensive transport. “Our weather also allows us to produce fruit beyond the production season in Europe,” Shahid said. This applies particularly to strawberries and grapes that are always in high demand in Europe.
Meanwhile, Raafat argued that while exports are a top target for many big farms in Egypt, “the local market is also proving to be surprisingly interested.”
He argued that the bigger the demand for exports, the larger the space dedicated to specific fruit on farms, “and this ends up making such fruit available at relatively affordable prices for local consumers,” he said.
A good example is the avocado and new varieties of peaches and prunes that have become quite popular in the local market across the socio-economic spectrum.
MARKET NICHES: Having followed local sales patterns for the past 20 years, Raafat argued that there is a growing niche market that is interested to have the new fruit on the table.
“It is true that this niche market is not very big, but in a country of 120 million people, it is not small either. This is how our newly planted fruit can end up seeing good sales in the big supermarkets — not just those that cater for the well-off, but also those that are frequented by the middle classes,” he said.
Mahmoud, whose business has an online ordering service, said that tropical fruit, both locally produced and imported, ranks number one among the orders that his farm receives every month “both from individuals and from patisseries and restaurants.”
“I would say that all types of berries top the list. Then comes passion fruit, which is gaining a lot of interest, then Longan fruit, and then the rambutan, which we import from Thailand,” he explained.
Shaher Salem, who manages the online sales of a farm that pays growing attention to tropical fruit, said that the demand for this type of fruit, expensive as it is, is not restricted to more affluent areas in Cairo.
“We get orders from several neighbourhoods, some more frequent than others, obviously,” he said.
“For every single fruit in Egypt today, there are categories. Strawberries, for example, are available from LE30 per kg to LE135 per kg, and each kind has its own customers,” he added.
The differences between one variety and another include the quality, the level of pesticides used, the level of durability, “which ultimately relates to plant growth hormones,” and to the type of seeds.
Big farms have been increasingly dependent on imported seeds. “This is a disadvantage because there are copyrights on most of these seeds that do not allow Egyptian farmers to apply adjustment or incubation techniques,” Fathi said. “However, on the other hand, the level of productivity of these seeds is much higher,” he added.
Obviously, when it comes to tropical fruit, it is all about imported seeds.
Raafat argued that the lack of seed programmes for fruit in Egypt makes it unavoidable for the big farms to count on imported seeds “while knowing that the contracts come with constraints”.
“Moreover, breeding new varieties is a very expensive business that requires large investments and a complicated legal process,” he added.
Inevitably, fruit is crucial for Egyptian agricultural exports, not just in the form of fresh fruit but also as frozen fruit and the concentrated essence that is used for juice production.
“It is much more economic for the big farms to count on imported seeds than to invest in processes of their own,” said the source at the Ministry of Agriculture.
“We have had some successful attempts with crops like rice, and this is something that we could build on, but obviously these take a long time before they yield the kind of results that could keep a business going,” Raafat said.
Egypt is working to expand its agricultural land and the volume of its harvests.
“The objective is to secure national food security,” said the source from the Ministry of Agriculture.
“An ideal scenario would integrate agricultural research schemes as well, but maybe a more realistic one would find it more profitable to start with expanding the volume of exported fruit in high demand, including tropical fruit that is included in the national agricultural scheme,” he said.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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