The Jamaican Roots of Hawaii's Pineapple Empire

The Indigenous Roots: Tainos and the Pineapple

While the pineapple (Ananas comosus) originated in South America — likely in the region between southern Brazil and Paraguay — it was the Taino people who cultivated and dispersed the fruit throughout the Caribbean, including Jamaica, long before European contact.

For the Tainos, the pineapple was more than just sustenance; it was a symbol of hospitality and abundance. They planted it widely across the islands, and its association with welcome and agricultural richness was later carried into colonial symbolism. The profound connection between Jamaica and the fruit was reflected when the pineapple appeared on the Jamaican Coat of Arms in 1661, symbolizing the island's natural agricultural abundance.

The Hawaiian Problem: Wild and Stringy Fruit

Fast forward to the nineteenth century in the Pacific. Pineapples were not native to Hawaii. The first verifiable written record of the fruit on the islands comes from the 1813 diary of Francisco de Paula Marín.

Throughout the early to mid-1800s, pineapples grew in Hawaii, but the early local fruit was often stringy, highly acidic, and not yet ideal for the emerging canning industry. At the time, commercial pineapple processing was developing in the United States and the Caribbean, and Hawaii needed a better plant if it wanted to compete in this lucrative trade.

The Jamaican Solution: Captain John Kidwell's 1886 Importation

The turning point for Hawaii occurred in the 1880s through the efforts of Captain John Kidwell, an English horticulturist who had relocated to Honolulu. Kidwell recognized the massive economic potential of a Hawaiian canning industry but knew the local fruit was inferior.

In 1885, Kidwell began testing crops in Oahu's Mānoa Valley. Searching for a superior cultivar that was sweeter, less fibrous, and lacked the sharp spines that injured field workers, he focused on a variety called the Smooth Cayenne. This variety had originated in French Guiana, spread through tropical horticulture, and was already established in places such as Jamaica.

According to historical accounts, Kidwell first ordered a dozen Smooth Cayenne plants from Florida in 1885 and another 1,000 from Jamaica in 1886. These shipments helped establish the variety in Hawaii. Of the Jamaican shipment, an estimated 600 plants survived the ocean transit and flourished in Hawaiian soil.

This introduction helped provide the genetic and commercial base for Kidwell’s early success. By 1892, Kidwell had 100,000 plants growing and established the Hawaiian Fruit and Packing Company.

The Legacy of the Smooth Cayenne

Kidwell's imported Smooth Cayenne was a revelation. Its cylindrical shape made it efficient to peel and core, and its high sugar content made it well suited to canning.

When James D. Dole arrived in Hawaii at the turn of the twentieth century and founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1901, he did not have to search for the right fruit. He built on the Smooth Cayenne cultivar that Kidwell had helped establish and combined it with automated processing machinery, such as the Ginaca machine, invented in 1911, to scale production to an unprecedented industrial level.

By the 1930s, Dole's company was packing over 100 million cans of pineapple a year, making Hawaii the undisputed leader in global production. Yet, that success rested on a longer history: Indigenous cultivation in the Americas and Caribbean, the movement of plant material across the tropics, and the commercial development of pineapple in Hawaii.