Sector News

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 You can either peel the skin from your babaco fruit before eating it or eat it whole. It’s also tasty when eaten raw or cooked into various recipes. It’s often pureed and made into a smoothie or milkshake, poured over ice cream, or added to recipes for pies, syrups, and other sweet treats.

Since babaco contains papain, a natural meat tenderizer, it’s also excellent when added to curries and stews with meat. Users sometimes also add it to salsas, sauces, and recipes that use other types of fresh fruit.

 How do you cut babaco?

One of the most popular ways to eat babaco raw is to cut it crosswise into thick slices, which will result in a star shape. This makes it a beautiful addition to fruit platters and an attractive garnish for drinks. Once you’ve sliced your babaco, you can also eat it as-is or sprinkle it with honey, sugar, or other sweetener and serve it chilled.

The sweet granadilla is a fruit with health benefits that very few people know about today. Not for nothing is it called "the children's fruit", since it has nutrients that stimulate physical and mental growth; helps alleviate digestive health issues, because it doesn't irritate the stomach; relieves thirst, thanks to its high water content; and it helps sleep thanks to its relaxing properties.

The sweet granadilla also contains a lot of potassium, calcium, phosphorus, iron and fiber, as well as proteins and carbohydrates. Moreover, it is rich in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B9, C, E, K and provitamin A.  

Have you tasted the Pepino? The juicy-sweet pulp is reminiscent of a blend of melon and pear and has a sugar content of four to eight percent. Other ingredients are vitamin C (35 to 70 mg per 100 g) and provitamin A.

The Pepino, also called the melon pear, is at home in the warm mountain valleys of Peru and Colombia. Today, however, it is also grown in many other countries in South America, the US and New Zealand. The fruit belongs to the Solanaceae family and thrives on low shrublands. Pepinos can grow 10 to 20 centimeters long. The shape and color of the fruit can vary a lot, from pointed to oblong like bananas or ribbed like a meaty tomato. The peel can be cream-colored to lemon yellow, with purple or violet stripes.

To eat cacao fruit, you pop one of those pulp-covered seeds in your mouth, and suck the sweet flesh off the seed. The pulp has a wonderful complex fruity flavor, sweet and tart, with hints of citrus, mango, maybe even pineapple. The flesh reminds me a lot of the complex fruity flavor blends in a cherimoya and atemoya, tropical fruits in the Annona genus. Sometimes there’s a hint of chocolate-y flavor alongside all the fruity tastes in the pulp.

Then if you’re feeling bold, you bite into the seed, and you experience the explosive taste of chocolate in its pure, untamed, undiluted form. This stuff is powerful, it’s bitter, it’s not sweet at all, but wow does it have an intense chocolate/cocoa flavor. If you’ve ever eaten the raw cacao nibs that are sold in dry form, that’s pretty close to the flavor of eating these cacao beans fresh, although the ones fresh out of the fruit also have a soft texture and a nutty flavor I don’t experience in the dry stuff.

Soursop cultivation in Colombia has increased in recent years, reaching significant figures: the country has 5,000 hectares devoted to this crop and exports more than 416,000 kg, worth one million dollars.

The total number of hectares sown, according to the Horticultural Association of Colombia (Asohofrucol), is almost 5,000 hectares, i.e. twice as much as a decade ago. Soursop consumption has become very popular in Colombia, which has the perfect climatic conditions to grow this fruit. The production areas have concentrated in the Valle del Cauca, Tolima, the so-called Coffee Region, and Boyaca.

Biodiversity in Ecuador is classified as one of the most diverse and exquisite in the world, especially in tropical fruits, and that is why the export of Ecuadorian pitahaya seeks new markets such as the case of Holland, the production of fruit is given in the Amazon region of the country also contains medicinal properties by its composition, also the fruit is used to create new products, such as juices, mousse and salads. The growth of the exports of the pitahaya has been possible thanks to the change of the productive matrix, the properties of the fruit are attractive for the European countries, so they prefer products with low caloric intake and carbohydrates, it also has a high content in vitamin C. The level of competitiveness that Ecuador has with the fruit is very high, being more preferred the yellow pitahaya, which is desired by its sweet and tropical flavor, in such a way that it is consumed by countries of Europe like Holland.