Narrator: Braving 30-foot-high cacti, sharp spines,
and sweltering heat is the only way
to reach this incredibly sweet and juicy fruit.
The pitaya is a type of dragon fruit.
Once it is picked, time is of the essence.
After 24 hours, the fruit begins
to lose its flavor and texture.
This makes getting pitaya to customers incredibly difficult
and pushes the price higher, depending on where you live.
In Guadalajara, Mexico, a batch of 4,000 pitayas
can sell for over $7,400.
Getting your hands on some in the US
can cost up to $22 for a bucket of five fruits.
So, what makes this fruit worth the painstaking task?
And why is it so expensive?
Pitayas grow on cacti,
just like prickly pear and dragon fruit.
They are often confused with dragon fruit
because of the similarity of their names:
pitaya and pitahaya.
But unlike dragon fruit or prickly pairs,
which grow all over the world,
pitaya can only be found in Mexico
and some parts of the US.
In the Mexican state of Jalisco,
these spiky fruits become a major driver
of the local economy when they're in season.
Narrator: Trinidad has been working with pitayas
for 15 years.
He started as a picker
and now runs a wholesale and retail business.
Narrator: He usually harvests the fruits
during the nighttime
and into the early hours of the morning.
Pitayas grow on a type of cactus
called the organ-pipe cactus.
These cacti can grow up to 30 feet tall.
To grab a pitaya at the top of the plant,
Trinidad uses a long reed fitted with spikes.
Narrator: Pitayas are available for a very short window.
The season usually starts around mid-April
and lasts 60 to 70 days,
with the first summer rains dictating the end of the season.
Unlike dragon fruits or prickly pairs,
pitayas grow in much smaller numbers.
In general, an organ-pipe cactus can give one fruit per day
or 60 pitayas for the whole season.
To start bearing fruit sparingly,
the cactus needs at least eight years.
To reach full maturity, it needs 15.
In comparison, at full maturity, a dragon-fruit cactus
can give three waves of fruit per season
of 100 fruits each.
Narrator: Once the fruit is off the cactus,
that's when the race begins.
Pitayas are made up of 85% water
and are very perishable.
They can only last 24 hours
before losing texture and flavor.
When Trinidad is done picking,
he has to process the fruit straightaway
if he wants it to arrive fresh to his customers.
Before they can be sold,
workers have to quickly remove the dozens of spines by hand.
While the spines are hard, the fruit is very fragile,
so when cleaning, one has to be careful
not to peel off too much skin.
This would make the fruit more tender,
and it would spoil faster.
Narrator: At the peak of the season,
Manuel can clean 3,000 to 4,000 pitayas a day.
With this many pitayas, a good batch could be worth
anywhere from $2,000 to $2,700.
Pitayas are praised for their sweetness.
They are also rich in vitamin C, fiber,
potassium, iron, and calcium,
and their seeds are rich in omega-3.
Pitayas come in four colors:
white, red, purple, and yellow.
Despite being the same type of cactus,
each plant will give a different-color pitaya,
with a different degree of sweetness.
Narrator: Because they spoil so quickly,
there are a few ways that pitaya get distributed,
each way determining the price.
Manuel sells them at a stand
that he has operated with his wife
for the last seven years.
Narrator: Market stands like Manuel's
are usually run by local families,
but pitayas are not just sold at local markets.
You can find Trinidad on the Colima-Guadalajara highway
at the 49-kilometer mark,
where he sells his pitayas from a roadside stand.
Pitaya are cheapest when they're sold locally.
In Mexico, the final price varies on the size of the fruit,
but also on location.
A batch of 4,000 high-quality pitayas
that could be worth up to $2,700 in a local market
could fetch over $7,400 for the extra hassle
it took to rush them to the city.
Andrés runs a pitaya-delivery company
with his brother, Juan Pablo.
They buy pitayas from wholesalers like Trinidad and Manuel
and distribute them to customers in Guadalajara,
the capital of Jalisco
and the only place apart from small towns
where pitayas are readily available.
Narrator: Getting pitayas out of town
and into the city is a challenge.
The pitayas have been off the tree for a few hours now,
and there's a high chance some of them
will not make it to their destination.
Narrator: This is why pitayas are extremely rare
to find outside of Mexico.
Only a handful of companies will take the risk
to ship the fruits abroad,
either by driving hours across the US border
or shipping them first-class.
These are usually preorders
that reach the customer directly
rather than transporting the pitayas
to another market stall.
The final price will be double
what a customer in Jalisco would pay.
Narrator: But it's the unpredictability of the season
that plays the biggest role.
Narrator: In the last few years,
pitayas have been even sweeter for locals.
The demand is growing,
companies like Andrés and Juan Pablo's
are spreading the word outside of town,
and the pitaya market is getting bigger.
The weather has also been ideal for pitaya.
In recent years,
the rains have arrived a bit later than usual
and brought less precipitation,
lengthening the growing season.
But this is not necessarily good news in the long term.
While cacti thrive in deserts
and the high temperatures allow their fruit to grow,
they are not immune to extreme heat.
A 2022 study found that 31% of the world's cactus species
are currently threatened with extinction.
By 2050, that number could increase to 90%
as a result of the climate becoming hotter and drier.
This pressure could make the pitaya
an even more fleeting fruit.
Even now, in full bloom,
one season is not enough for locals like Trinidad
to support themselves year-round.