40 Fun Facts About Kiwi Fruit

Until a 1959 rebrand, kiwifruit was sold under a name pairing the word Chinese with which other fruit?

Gooseberry is the flavour early tasters are said to have been reminded of, and the name Chinese gooseberry stuck for decades even though the two plants are unrelated.

Raw kiwifruit stops which common setting agent from working, because of an enzyme in the fruit?

Gelatine stays runny when raw kiwifruit is added, and that is how the enzyme was found: in 1959 a chemist looked into why kiwifruit jellies would not set.

Which animals are so drawn to the smell of hardy kiwi plants that they dig up the roots?

Cats are lured by a catnip-like smell the plant gives off, and they have been known to destroy young hardy kiwis while hunting for its source.

Why will a single kiwifruit plant grown alone in a garden almost never produce any fruit?

Plants are male or female in almost all kiwifruit, so orchards mix the two, with roughly one male for every five to eight fruit-bearing females.

Which nutrient is green kiwifruit richest in, with 100 grams supplying most or all of a day's recommended value?

Vitamin C is the kiwifruit's headline nutrient, and gold varieties carry even more of it than green ones, well over a day's value in 100 grams.

Which meringue dessert, claimed by both Australia and New Zealand, is often topped with sliced kiwifruit?

Pavlova takes its name from the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured both countries in the 1920s, and the two still dispute who made it first.

A firm kiwifruit ripens faster in a paper bag with a banana, which gives off which ripening gas?

Ethylene is a plant hormone that ripe fruit releases, which is also why a ripe kiwifruit keeps best when stored well away from the fruit bowl.

Which part of a fuzzy green kiwifruit do most people throw away, although it is perfectly safe to eat?

The skin is tart but edible, and it is the fuzzy texture that puts people off: smoother gold kiwifruit are far easier to eat unpeeled.

Kiwifruit's enzyme actinidin breaks down protein, making the fruit commercially useful for which kitchen job?

Tenderising meat is the enzyme's commercial use, and the same action makes raw kiwifruit a poor match for milk desserts, because it digests milk proteins too.

Chinese shoppers often call kiwifruit qiyiguo, a sound-alike name borrowed back from which language?

English handed the fruit back to China under a new name: qiyiguo imitates the sound of the word kiwi, and its characters can be read as strange fruit.

Kiwifruit grows on which kind of plant, which orchards train over sturdy pergolas or T-bar frames?

A woody vine bears the fruit, and the pergola and T-bar supports that growers now use around the globe were both designed in New Zealand.

American servicemen stationed in New Zealand acquired a taste for kiwifruit during which conflict?

World War II made the fruit's name twice over: the troops spread the taste, and in 1959 exporters chose a new name they hoped those veterans would warm to.

Which US state took New Zealand's first American kiwifruit shipments in the 1950s and now farms the fruit itself?

California was the gateway: an importer there asked for a catchier name, and local orchardists who planted the crop helped the new word catch on.

Which European country overtook New Zealand around 1990 to become the world's biggest kiwifruit producer?

Italy planted the very variety New Zealand had bred, and when more countries joined in, the world price of kiwifruit crashed in 1992.

Honey bees soon lose interest in kiwifruit flowers because the blossoms produce none of what?

Nectar is missing from the flowers, so growers pack orchards with about eight hives per hectare until the bees have little else to visit.

Ripe kiwifruit flesh stays bright green thanks to which pigment, one rarely found in other ripe fruit?

Chlorophyll, the same pigment that colours leaves, is rarely found in ripe fruit, which makes a sliced kiwifruit one of the greenest things in the fruit bowl.

Hardy kiwis, hairless relatives of the kiwifruit that are eaten whole, are roughly the size of which fruit?

Grape is the usual comparison: hardy kiwis are sold by the punnet as kiwi berries, and the plants shrug off winters far colder than ordinary kiwifruit can stand.

Under which brand name does a grower-owned company sell New Zealand's kiwifruit around the globe?

Zespri grew out of a national marketing board that was given a monopoly on almost all of the country's kiwifruit exports.

In traditional China, kiwifruit was regarded less as a treat than as what for growing children?

A medicine, or tonic, is how the fruit was mainly regarded: it was given to children to help them grow and to women recovering from childbirth.

Which allergy, common among health workers, often brings reactions to kiwifruit, banana and avocado too?

Latex allergy often comes with reactions to certain fruits, a link doctors call latex-fruit syndrome, and kiwifruit is among the four most often blamed.

The Chinese name mihoutao calls kiwifruit the peach of which mountain animal, said to feast on it?

Macaque peach is the literal meaning, and a 12th-century Chinese herbal noted that monkeys ate the wild fruit along mountain paths.

Which green kiwifruit variety, named after the Auckland nurseryman who raised it, became the worldwide standard?

Hayward was raised in the 1920s by nurseryman Hayward Wright, and by 1975 it was the only kiwifruit variety New Zealand exported.

Isabel Fraser, who brought the first kiwifruit seeds to New Zealand from China, held which job?

School principal Isabel Fraser collected the seeds while visiting her sister, a missionary teacher, and a Whanganui grower raised the first plants from them.

Exporters coined the word kiwifruit in 1959 by modelling it on the name of which other fruit?

Passionfruit was the pattern Jack Turner had in mind when he bolted kiwi, a byword for New Zealand, onto the word fruit.

Psa, the disease that devastated New Zealand's gold kiwifruit from 2010, is caused by what kind of organism?

A bacterium called Pseudomonas syringae causes it; the outbreak wiped out the first gold variety and pushed growers to switch to a tougher replacement.

Hongyang, a Chinese kiwifruit raised in Sichuan from the seed of wild plants, is prized for flesh of which colour?

Red kiwifruit began with Hongyang, China's first commercial variety of the colour, and by 2020 it was the most widely grown kiwifruit in the country.

Which tourist attractions in the Iya Valley on Shikoku are woven from several tons of hardy kiwi stems?

Bridges of woven hardy kiwi span the Iya River, the best known about 45 metres long, and the stems have to be replaced every three years.

Kiwifruit belongs to the plant order Ericales, which makes it a distant relative of which popular drink crop?

Tea sits in the same order as kiwifruit, alongside blueberries, cranberries, persimmons and Brazil nuts.

Kiwifruit seed oil is mostly alpha-linolenic acid, a fat that belongs to which well-known family?

Omega-3 fats are more often linked with oily fish, but alpha-linolenic acid is the plant form, and it makes up about 62% of the oil in kiwifruit seeds.

How is commercial kiwifruit harvested, even in orchards that yield many tonnes from every hectare?

Picked by hand is still the rule: pickers fill bags that are emptied into large wooden bins, and most of New Zealand's crop comes off in May.

The trial name melonette was dropped for kiwifruit because melons and berries both faced high what in America?

Import tariffs on melons and berries made melonette as awkward as the old name, so the importer asked for a short Maori word instead.

How did American produce dealer Frieda Caplan persuade the president of a grocery chain to stock kiwifruit?

Served him lunch, with several courses of kiwifruit dishes; the fruit made her name, and Caplan became known as the Kiwi Queen.

Which Bay of Plenty town, ringed by orchards, markets itself as the kiwifruit capital of the world?

Te Puke is where Jim MacLoughlin, often called the father of the industry, planted his first block in the 1930s, and its orchards supplied New Zealand's first export shipments in the early 1950s.

The kiwifruit disease Psa, found in New Zealand in 2010, had arrived on an imported shipment of what?

Pollen imported from China carried the disease, and in 2021 the government paid growers NZ$40 million to settle a lawsuit over letting it in.

How did New Zealand's licensed SunGold kiwifruit end up growing in thousands of unauthorised hectares in China?

Smuggled cuttings were the source: by 2021 the growers' company estimated about 5,000 hectares of unlicensed SunGold in China, mainly in Sichuan.

The kolomikta kiwi, hardiest of the family, is grown in gardens for leaves splashed with white and which other colour?

Pink and white patches mark some of the leaves at random, and the variegation is thought to make them less tempting to plant-eating animals.

In 2025 the European Commission authorised a health claim that green kiwifruit helps which organ work normally?

The bowel is what the claim covers, through more frequent stools, and the wording applies when at least 200 grams of the fresh fruit are eaten daily.

In which country did kiwifruit marketers launch the Kiwi Brothers, a pair of fuzzy fruit mascots, in 2016?

Japan took to the Kiwi Brothers so warmly that the mascots were sent abroad two years later, and a third, crimson brother has since joined the pair.

Which tropical fruit contains bromelain, an enzyme that digests protein much as the actinidin in kiwifruit does?

Pineapple's bromelain is a close cousin of actinidin, though the kiwifruit enzyme is the more delicate of the two and breaks down at about 60 °C.

Which Chinese city's botanical garden holds the world's largest kiwifruit gene bank and bred the gold variety Jintao?

Wuhan Botanical Garden bred Jintao in the 1980s from wild plants, and in 2001 it sold the exclusive breeding rights to a European fruit company.