Chico Fruit
Definition
The chico is the Philippine market name for the sapodilla (Manilkara zapota), a fruit tree native to southern Mexico and Central America that produces round to oval fruits with rough brown skin and sweet, grainy, malty-flavored flesh ranging from yellow to reddish brown. Introduced to the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era via the galleon trade, chico became a common backyard and orchard tree in lowland areas and a familiar street-market fruit. The same tree yields chicle, the latex that was historically the base of chewing gum.
Identities
| Source Type | Identity |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Manilkara zapota |
| Wikidata | Q14959 |
| DBpedia | Manilkara zapota |
Also Known As
Sapodilla; chicoo; chikoo; tsiko (colloquial Filipino spelling); sofeda (in parts of South Asia).
Examples and Analogies
Chico’s brown-sugar sweetness and sandy pear-like texture place it in the same family of “custardy” tropical street fruits as atis and guyabano — fruits rarely seen in supermarkets but sold by the pile in provincial markets and eaten fresh with the fingers.
Usage Scenarios
Filipinos eat chico fresh as a snack or dessert, halving the fruit and scooping the flesh while discarding the hard black seeds, and the pulp is blended into shakes. Because ripe fruits bruise easily, vendors sell them slightly firm and consumers ripen them at home, while the durable tree is planted as a shade and border tree in rural yards.
Strategies
Growers propagate chico by grafting to ensure fruit quality, prune for manageable harvest, and pick fruits mature-green for careful ripening off the tree — a practice that manages its notoriously short ripe shelf life. Intercropping with other fruit trees and minimal chemical inputs suit the species’ hardiness in seasonal dry areas.
Security and Safety Measures
Ripe chico is safe to eat, but the hard black seeds are a choking hazard for small children and are discarded; unripe fruit is astringent and unpalatable. Post-harvest care matters because damaged skin invites spoilage, so fruits are handled gently and consumed within days of full ripening.
Historical Context
Spanish galleons carried Mexican food plants across the Pacific from the sixteenth century onward, and chico — together with atis, guava, papaya, and cacao — naturalized in Philippine lowlands within generations. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the fruit was entrenched in local markets, while its relative drought tolerance made it a dependable tree in seasonally dry provinces.
Challenges and Controversies
Chico exemplifies the plight of many “old” Philippine fruits: little commercial breeding or post-harvest investment, leaving it a niche market fruit amid banana and mango dominance. Agricultural writers periodically campaign for rediscovering such heirloom fruits, while the chewing-gum industry’s shift from chicle to synthetics ended the tree’s latex economy in most producing countries, including effectively in the Philippines.
Related Topic
Lanzones