Pineapple Trivia
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49 free Pineapple trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
48 free pineapple trivia questions with answers. The pineapple has a stranger history than almost any fruit in the supermarket. It travelled from Brazil to Europe with Columbus, became so expensive that 18th-century hosts rented one for the dinner table, drove James Dole to buy an entire Hawaiian island, and ended up on pizza in Ontario. This quiz covers all of it in forty-eight questions. Easy questions ask what pineapples grow on, which cartoon sponge lives in one, and what a piña colada is made of. Harder ones get into botany (why it fixes carbon at night, why its eyes follow Fibonacci numbers), farming (the Smooth Cayenne and MD-2 cultivars, why hummingbirds are banned in Hawaii) and history (Louis XV, the Dunmore Pineapple, the Philippine piña cloth trade). Good for pub quizzes, classrooms and food nerds. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the pineapple, its growers, its dishes and its drinks, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which continent is the pineapple plant native?
South America
South America: wild pineapples come from the Paraná–Paraguay basin, and Indigenous peoples carried the crop north to Mexico and the Caribbean before Europeans arrived.
Q 02What is the pineapple's scientific name?
Ananas comosus
Ananas comosus: wild pineapples once named as a separate species, Ananas bracteatus, are now counted as a variety of it.
Q 03Which plant belongs to the same botanical family as the pineapple?
Spanish moss
Spanish moss: it is no true moss but a flowering plant in the pineapple's family, hanging from trees across the American South.
Q 04Which explorer was the first European to encounter a pineapple, on Guadeloupe?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus: he is said to have carried a pineapple back to Spain, though the fruit tended to rot on the long Atlantic crossing.
Q 05Why did 17th-century English speakers give the pineapple its name?
The fruit resembled a pine cone
The fruit resembled a pine cone, and 'pine apple' had already meant a pine cone since the 1300s, so the old name moved to the new fruit.
Q 06Botanically, what is a pineapple?
A multiple fruit of fused flowers
A multiple fruit of fused flowers: each 'eye' on the skin was a separate flower whose berry merged with its neighbours around the central stalk.
Q 07What is the 'Pineapple Express' that drenches the US West Coast?
An atmospheric river
An atmospheric river: it carries tropical moisture from near Hawaii to the coast, and its heaviest storms can bring floods and mudslides.
Q 08In the wild, pineapples are mainly pollinated by what?
Hummingbirds
Hummingbirds: Hawaii barred importing them, since pollinated fruit sets hard seeds that growers don't want.
Q 09A pineapple's spiral 'eyes' run in helices of 8 and 13, numbers from which famous series?
The Fibonacci sequence
Sunflower seeds and pine cones show the same pattern.
Q 10Which unusual type of photosynthesis lets pineapples take in carbon dioxide at night?
CAM
CAM, crassulacean acid metabolism, lets pineapples open their stomata at night, storing carbon dioxide as malic acid and releasing it by day, a water-saving trick shared with cacti.
Q 11Which country's growers were the first in Europe to grow pineapple fruit?
Holland
Holland: Dutch growers were fruiting pineapples by the 1680s, and plants from Dutch gardens went on to stock English and French gardens.
Q 12Which French king was presented with a pineapple grown at Versailles in 1733?
Louis XV
Louis XV, who reigned from 1715 to 1774, was presented with a pineapple grown in the Versailles hothouses in 1733, three years after Dutch plants reached French gardeners.
Q 13Why were pineapples an 18th-century wealth symbol?
They cost a fortune to import or raise in heated pineries
Q 21Which Caribbean nation's coat of arms shows five golden pineapples on a red cross?
Jamaica
Jamaica: at independence in 1962, the arms' Latin motto gave way to 'Out of Many, One People'.
Q 22What is the name of the pineapple enzyme that tenderises meat and stops gelatin from setting?
Bromelain
Bromelain: heat breaks it down, which is why cooked or canned pineapple won't tenderise meat.
Q 23Raw pineapple is a rich source of vitamin C and which mineral?
Manganese
Manganese: its black ore was long used by glassmakers to take the green tint out of glass.
Which Mexican taco filling is pork marinated with chillies and pineapple?
They cost a fortune to import or raise in heated pineries, so a single fruit went on show at dinner after dinner, and some were rented for an evening.
Q 14In architecture, a carved pineapple traditionally symbolises what?
Hospitality
Hospitality: probably through its association with the nobility, the fruit became a favourite 18th-century motif on gateposts, doorways and finials.
Q 15The Dunmore Pineapple, a folly topped by a giant stone pineapple, stands in which country?
Scotland
Scotland: restored with the Landmark Trust, the folly can now be rented as a holiday home.
Q 16Which cultivar, brought to France in 1820, dominated 20th-century world pineapple production?
Smooth Cayenne
Smooth Cayenne: from France it went on to Britain and was spread around the world, as far as Australia.
Q 17Which 'Pineapple King' arrived in Honolulu in 1899 and founded his namesake pineapple company?
James Dole
James Dole: in 1927 he offered $25,000 for the first flight from Oakland to Honolulu, a contest that cost ten lives.
Q 18Which Hawaiian island did the Hawaiian Pineapple Company buy in 1922 to turn into a plantation?
Lanai
Lanai: pineapple farming there wound down in the early 1990s, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison bought almost all of the island in 2012.
Q 19What did engineer Henry Ginaca invent that transformed Hawaii's pineapple canning industry?
An automatic peeling and coring machine
An automatic peeling and coring machine: it more than doubled how many pineapples could be processed a minute, from about 15.
Q 20What is the rosette of stiff leaves on top of a pineapple called?
The crown
The crown: the plant's stem keeps growing up through the fruit, forming its core, and ends in this tuft of stiff leaves.
Al pastor
Al pastor: Lebanese immigrants brought spit-roasted shawarma to Mexico, and local cooks swapped the lamb for pork.
Q 25Pineapples stop ripening once picked, but which fruit keeps ripening off the plant?
Banana
Banana: like other climacteric fruits, it keeps producing ethylene, the gas that drives ripening, after it is picked.
Q 26How can you grow a new pineapple at home from a shop-bought fruit?
Plant the leafy top
Plant the leafy top: set in soil it roots into a new plant, while commercial growers plant side shoots called slips and suckers.
Q 27About how long does a pineapple plant take from planting to its first fruit?
About 18 months
About 18 months: farms grow new plants from shoots rather than seeds, and commercial fruit is normally seedless.
Q 28Despite its name, Hawaiian pizza was invented in which country?
Canada
Canada: Greek-born Sam Panopoulos first served it in Chatham, Ontario, in 1962, and pizza purists have argued about it ever since.
Q 29Which country's president joked in 2017 that he would ban pineapple on pizza if he could?
Iceland
Iceland: Guðni Th. Jóhannesson said it while taking questions from high-school pupils in Akureyri, and the joke set off a worldwide media storm.
Q 30Pineapple juice, coconut cream and rum make which cocktail?
Piña colada
Piña colada: Rupert Holmes wrote it into his 1979 hit 'Escape' at the last minute, replacing a line about Humphrey Bogart.