How it works
Five fruits at a time, out of 120: this random fruit generator covers apples and stone fruit, berries, citrus, melons, tropical fruit, and a few that fit nowhere else. Cards add a season where we could confirm one. Narrow the draw with the Any kind menu, or Easy to find under More filters.
Read the full guide
For when the thought is just: give me a random fruit
Take the first fruit: the page works as a fruit randomizer for small decisions: what goes in the lunchbox, which jam to make, what to sketch. Choose Easy to find under More filters if the answer has to be on a shelf near you: 31 supermarket fruits, from apple to pomegranate. Add Berries and currants in the Any kind menu and five are left. Citrus with Hard to find leaves four: bergamot orange, citron, Buddha's hand and finger lime.
What counts as a fruit here
The list keeps to fruits people eat as fruit. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and avocados are fruits to a botanist, but cooks treat them as vegetables, so they are out. Hybrids with a name of their own, such as tangelo, boysenberry and calamansi, get a card each, and the card names the parents.
- To pick a random fruit for a class quiz, press Hide all facts and ask where each comes from.
- One new fruit a month: choose Hard to find under More filters, take the first fruit, then try an international grocer or a farmers' market.
- Starts with, under More filters, suits alphabet games. Q gives quince, Y gives yuzu, and X gives nothing, which settles the argument.
Questions and answers
Which season do the cards mean?
Harvest time in the Northern Hemisphere, unless the card names a place, such as honeydew in California or mamey sapote in Florida. A card carries a season only where we could confirm one in its source, so many tropical fruits and year-round supermarket fruits have none.
How are Easy to find and Hard to find decided?
They are our own grading, made as a supermarket shopper in North America or Europe would see it. Easy to find holds 31 fruits that most large shops stock for much of the year. Hard to find holds 37 that rarely travel far, such as jabuticaba, cloudberry and pawpaw. The other 52 sit in between.
Why is a banana under tropical fruit and not under berries?
The groups follow how shops and cooks sort fruit, not botany. To a botanist a banana, a grape, a kiwifruit and even a finger lime are berries, while a raspberry is not: it is a cluster of tiny drupelets. A coconut is a drupe, like a cherry.