Forget Everything You Knew About The Way You Consume Fruit
When we think about consuming fruit, we usually picture someone peeling a banana or slicing a watermelon. Maybe we think about a smoothie stand on the beaches of Thailand or Brazil.
But one of the last things that comes to mind is… powder.
Well, it’s time to reset our thinking because powder is the next big thing in the global fruit consumption market. With a market valued at $54.55 billion in 2024 and an average annual growth rate of 6.7%, the conservative estimate is that within a decade, the market will surpass $100 billion.
For comparison, in North America in 2022, the consumption of fruit-based jams was $1.8 billion, fruit puree was $3.1 billion, and the market for fruit powder was no less than $17.5 billion! Such trade and consumption volumes, along with the establishment of dozens of corporations from India to North America specializing in the production and distribution of fruit powder, indicate that we’re not talking about a passing trend but a new consumer perception gaining global traction.
But what drives the mass shift towards fruit powders? Why consume fruit as a powder, and what does it have to do with global warming?
We got da Powder!
It may seem strange to consume fruit as a powder, but when you think about it, we’ve been doing it with other agricultural crops for hundreds and thousands of years. The entire world of spices, from turmeric to paprika, is based on making powder from vegetables and roots. Now we’re simply adding fruits to this equation.
Fruit powder is made through a process that includes freezing and drying parts of the fruit and then carefully grinding them into powder. When you think about it, the resulting powder has several significant advantages:
- Health
Thanks to the freezing and drying process, fruit powder retains the nutritional values of the original fruit (minus the dietary fibers). This means that the vitamins and minerals in the fruit are preserved in the powder, allowing you to get a high amount of essential vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals in just one spoonful of powder. The process also preserves the flavor and aroma components of the fruit, making it easy to add fruit powder to baked goods, desserts, or a bowl of cereal in the morning, enhancing them with a lot of flavor, colorful appearance, and high nutritional values. - Storage and Transport
Ask any Colombian who lived in Medellin in the 1980s, and they’ll tell you that powder is the most convenient form of material for storage and transport. Unlike fresh fruit, powder has an infinitely longer shelf life and can be used even after long months of storage without losing its nutritional values. Another advantage is the storage volume that powder occupies. If you compare a watermelon to watermelon powder, the difference in storage volume is enormous. These two advantages open up many new markets for fruit powder, from use in military field units to nutrition for athletes and mountain climbers. Additionally, the ability to easily transport the powder can make fruit from certain growing regions accessible to consumption areas where the fruits cannot be grown, without the need for expensive and cumbersome storage and transport adjustments. - Environmental Quality and Food Security
Fruit powders are usually made from fruits and parts of fruits destined for disposal. This means there’s a recycling process or, more accurately, a massive reduction of waste and turning it into healthy and nutritious food. Here, too, there is enormous potential for saving industrial resources aimed at getting rid of huge amounts of waste, significantly reducing environmental pollution, and improving the food security of the world’s population. - Ease of Use
Ultimately, using powder is easy; it doesn’t require peeling, cooking, boiling, or fussing. The powder is accessible and can be used either as a food additive, much like a spice, or as an addition to milk- or water-based drinks.
What’s Your Super Powder?
Considering the fact that we live in a world that seeks to make our lives easier with technological and scientific shortcuts and, at the same time, places increasing emphasis on our health and environmental quality, suddenly using fruit powder sounds like the most natural, smart, and expected thing. Add to this the growth in the vegetarian and vegan audience, and you’ll find that fruit powders are going to take up an increasingly large space on supermarket shelves, in markets, and in our home shelves and drawers, even though they will never replace the feeling of a refreshing bite of cold watermelon on a hot summer day.
