Many of my fondest summer memories are centered around the juicy ripe red heart of a watermelon. My grandparents grew them in the sandy soil that surrounded their northwest Louisiana home, and every summer when we’d go visit, I would eagerly await the day that my grandfather said that one was finally ready to eat. Sitting on the tailgate of someone’s truck, I would scarf the watermelon that had chilled in the deep freezer all day long, spitting out the seeds at my feet.
While I don’t miss this display of spitting in front of my friends and relatives, I do miss the enormous seeded watermelons of my youth. Those are becoming harder and harder to find, both on grocery store shelves and at farmers markets. According to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, seedless watermelons have dominated the market since the early 2000s, and starting around 2014, a whopping 92 percent of all watermelons shipped from farms have been seedless. But why, exactly, have they taken over as the dominant watermelon variety?
According to Bob Hochmuth, a regional agent for the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, there are a few reasons for this massive shift. When Hochmuth was growing up on a Maryland watermelon farm in the ’60s and ’70s, his family grew large Jubilee and Charleston Gray watermelons to sell to melon-hungry consumers. “Back then everything was a seeded watermelon, and the preference was for large watermelons,” Hochmuth says. “There’s two things that started to happen: the family unit got smaller, so people started wanting smaller watermelons, and then in the early 1990s came the advent of the seedless watermelon.”
Seedless watermelons were first invented in Japan in the late 1930s, but they were difficult to grow and lacked resistance to disease. And, because there were no seeds with which to grow future melons, growers kept the crop going by buying or growing additional plants each year that would never produce any viable fruits. In the early ’90s, advances in pollination and cultivation meant that the seedless watermelon slowly started to gain popularity across the country, and by the 2000s, it was the dominant watermelon. For consumers, Hochmuth says that the choice was easy. “It’s a convenience thing,” he says. “It’s just easier to consume the watermelon when you don’t have to deal with the seeds.”
There’s a practical element to the seedless watermelon’s success, too: shelf life. Seedless watermelons last longer on store shelves and in the consumer’s kitchen than seeded varieties. The seeds within a watermelon produce ethylene gas, which causes the fruit to ripen faster than seedless varieties. If you’ve ever had a seeded watermelon that was mushy in the center, you can blame the seeds for that textural nightmare. A seedless watermelon, on the other hand, can keep for weeks on the counter without any major impacts on flavor and texture.
Hochmuth also doesn’t believe that seedless watermelons are inherently inferior to seeded watermelons, completely busting my nostalgia-soaked theory. There are some slight distinctions between the two: seedless watermelon flesh can be crisper and firmer, which many consumers find preferable. Hochmuth notes that the best qualities of a watermelon — how sweet it is, whether or not its flesh is crisp and juicy — can be found regardless of whether the fruit has seeds.
And maybe because of the seedless watermelon’s dominance, Hochmuth has observed a small resurgence among seeded watermelon varieties. For some folks, the novelty of a yellow-fleshed or heirloom melon is more enticing than a basic grocery store melon. The popularity of varieties like Black Diamond and Jubilee is surging, also perhaps due in part to the nostalgia that other folks feel for these old-school seeded melons. This spring, watermelon farmers were able to demand higher prices for seeded watermelons than seedless for the first time in decades.
“Consumers are very interested in trying something new, something different,” he says. “But there’s also a sizable enough group of folks who are looking for that old-timey type of watermelon.”
This is a development that makes me incredibly excited. Now, in the dead of summer, I’m regularly scoping out vendors to see which types of watermelons they’re offering, and there really do seem to be a lot more seeded melons in the mix. And whether or not seeded is actually any better than seedless — Hochmuth insists that it’s not — I’m still thrilled at more opportunities to indulge my nostalgia and spend the dog days of summer spitting a few seeds from the back of a truck tailgate.
