In 1683 Captain Shaddock, an officer in the British East India Company, gave seeds from the Malaysia grapefruit, which is the pomelo not the true grapefruit to William Jones, a planter from Mandeville, Jamaica.
Later, the pomelo spread to other Caribbean islands. Sometime in the 18th country, the pomelo hybridized with the sweet orange, evidently without human intervention, to yield the grapefruit.
Griffith Hughes British cleric was the first person in 1750 to describe the new fruit as ‘forbidden fruit’. Later in 1789, Patrick Browne mentioned it under the name ‘forbidden fruit’ or ‘smaller shaddock’ form Jamaica.
According to one account Odette Felipe, a Spanish aristocrat, introduced the grapefruit into Florida in 1809. The originally grapefruit planted in Florida were the seedy types such as the Duncan.
Duncan was the leading cultivar for many years in the Florida and Texas and was introduced into all the grapefruit growing areas of the world. It was not immediate success. Some Floridians grew the grapefruit as an ornamental.
By 1910, farmers were growing grapefruit in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and in California and Arizona.
Today the production of grapefruit in Florida is so heavy that the fresh fruit market cannot absorbed the crop and the bulk of the fruit, therefore has to be converted into canned juice.
The processing of grapefruit into segments and juices was initiated in the late 1920’s as a means of expanding market outlets for the rapid increase in United States production.
History of grapefruit to United States
