Have you ever had a papaya? Do you even know what one looks like, let alone how to judge a ripe one? If not, don’t worry; you’re among the majority of Americans.
Every year, The Packer conducts its Fresh Trends survey of American consumers on their fresh produce purchase behavior. Fresh Trends 2025 asked consumers two questions about picking ripe fruit:
- Do you feel comfortable selecting a ripe [fruit] for immediate consumption?
- Do you know how to ripen [fruit] once you get them home?
Bananas were the most well-known with most survey respondents saying they were comfortable picking ready-to-eat fruit (72%) and knew how to ripen unripe fruit at home (63%). Other fruits were less well known to respondents.
Papayas were the most unknown fruit. Only 16% of survey respondents said they were comfortable picking a ripe, ready-to-eat papaya, and only 14% said they knew how to ripen an unripe papaya at home. These were the lowest response rates of all fruit surveyed by the ripeness questions.
A Hawaiian connection
For Eric Weinert, president of the Hawaii Papaya Industry Association, the results didn’t come as a surprise.
“I think even produce clerks and supermarkets don’t know how to select [a papaya] properly,” he said.
In Weinert’s experience, people who go looking for papaya at the grocery store had it first in Hawaii, the only state in the U.S. that grows the fruit.
“They have a relationship here,” he said of papaya consumers. “No one has introduced them to it in the mainland. They had it in Hawaii, and they liked it so much that they want to try it when they get home.”
The demographic differences in the 2025 Fresh Trends survey data support this, according to Weinert. Respondents living on the West Coast had the highest rate of reporting being comfortable picking a ripe, ready-to-eat papaya (19%) across geographic regions. Respondents with household incomes over $50,000 annually similarly reported being comfortable picking ripe papayas more than did lower-income respondents.
“That just tells me that those people are more likely to visit Hawaii,” Weinert concluded.
Picking a ripe papaya
Weinert explained that picking a ripe papaya isn’t all that different from selecting other, more familiar fruit.
“This is the simple explanation: Just like a banana, a papaya tastes best when it’s not too green and it’s not too ripe,” he said.
Of course, nothing is simple when it comes to a fruit that has to travel almost the length of the U.S. before it gets from its orchards to the closest port in Southern California.
Weinert explained that the year-round production of papaya and the time it takes to ship them by boat to the mainland means the fruit are harvested at a variety of stages of ripeness. Even a fully green papaya will ripen in about a week if left on the counter in Hawaii’s ambient 82°F, he said. But if a green fruit has been chilled below 55° before it starts showing some color, it will never ripen properly. And many retailers will chill them, not aware of the best handling practices. This means customers might start out in a situation where picking a ripe papaya isn’t possible.
So, Weinert said consumers should also use avocado rules for selecting a papaya.
“Everybody knows how to eat an avocado; you can’t look at it and know if it’s ripe or not, but you squeeze it and you know. It gives a little bit to your finger,” he said. “The same is true for a papaya. Color is one indicator, but it’s really that little bit of give, that softness when you give it a gentle squeeze, that tells you if it’s ripe or not.”
He said when a papaya is about 50% yellow and soft, it is ripe and can be put into the refrigerator. It will continue to ripen and can be stored for several weeks.
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