Feijoa tastes like a blend of pineapple, guava, and strawberry, with a perfumed sweetness that’s unlike any other fruit. The flavor is sweet-sour with a dominant fruity, honey-like note and a floral, almost minty finish. If you’ve never tried one, imagine biting into something that smells tropical and tastes simultaneously tart and sweet, with a fragrance so strong you can smell it from across the room.
The Core Flavor Profile
The best single-word descriptor for feijoa is “complex.” The dominant taste is sweet-sour, but layered underneath are notes that shift as you eat: fresh and fruity upfront, then honeyed, then floral, with a subtle herbal or minty quality at the end. The fruit’s aroma does a lot of the heavy lifting here. Much of what you perceive as “taste” is actually the intense fragrance hitting your nose as you chew. That fragrance comes primarily from a mix of natural esters and terpenes, the same types of aromatic compounds that give peaches their sweetness, flowers their perfume, and mint its cool edge.
The fruity, honey-like quality is the strongest note in a feijoa’s aroma. Some varieties also carry a faint banana-like scent. People often compare feijoa to pineapple guava (it’s actually the same plant family), but the flavor is more nuanced than guava alone. Where guava can be almost overwhelmingly fragrant, feijoa balances that intensity with tartness and a clean, bright finish.
What the Texture Is Like
Cut a feijoa in half at the middle and you’ll see two distinct zones. The outer flesh near the skin is creamy white and slightly granular, similar in texture to a pear. Toward the center, the flesh turns translucent and jelly-like, with small soft seeds suspended in juice. The contrast between the denser outer flesh and the slippery, almost jam-like center is part of what makes eating a feijoa feel different from other fruits. Most people scoop the whole interior out with a spoon.
Skin Versus Flesh
The skin is where things get divisive. There’s no clear boundary between the green outer skin and the flesh underneath, so “peeling” a feijoa is more of a gradual scraping than a clean separation. The outer layer contains a high concentration of the fruit’s characteristic aromatic compounds, so it actually carries more feijoa flavor than the interior. The catch is that it also carries bitter and sour notes that many people find unpleasant.
Whether you eat the skin depends partly on where the fruit was grown. Wild feijoas from higher-altitude regions of Brazil tend to have harder, more bitter flesh, and people there typically scoop out only the sweet seed pulp. Varieties from Uruguay and southern Brazil have softer, sweeter flesh throughout, and the whole fruit is eaten together. Most commercially grown feijoas in New Zealand and California fall closer to the Uruguayan type, with milder skin that’s more palatable, though still tangier than the center.
How Sweetness Varies by Variety
Not all feijoas taste the same. Sugar content across varieties ranges from about 10 to 18 degrees Brix, which is a significant spread. For context, 10 Brix is roughly the sweetness of an orange, while 18 Brix approaches the level of a ripe mango. If you pick up a feijoa and find it bland or overly tart, the variety (or ripeness) may be the issue rather than the fruit itself. Sweeter cultivars taste more tropical and honeyed, while lower-sugar types lean tart and herbaceous.
Ripeness matters enormously. An underripe feijoa is astringent and grassy, with a hard texture that’s nothing like the lush, perfumed experience of a ripe one. The fruit is ready when it gives slightly to gentle pressure and the interior has turned from white to translucent. A ripe feijoa that’s been chilled for a few days actually develops a more pronounced sweet, fruity aroma as cold storage reduces the herbaceous, green-tasting compounds and lets the sweeter notes come forward.
How Cooking Changes the Flavor
Heat concentrates feijoa’s sweetness and softens its tartness, but it also burns off some of the delicate floral and minty top notes that make the raw fruit so distinctive. Cooked feijoa tastes richer and more jam-like, closer to a tropical fruit compote. This is why feijoa works well in chutneys, crumbles, and baked goods, where the deeper honey and guava flavors hold up even when the lighter aromatic notes fade. Feijoa also pairs naturally with ginger, cinnamon, and vanilla, which complement its warm, sweet-sour base without competing with it.
For preserves and baking, the skin is often included because its concentrated flavor compounds survive cooking better than the milder pulp. The bitterness that can be off-putting when raw mellows considerably with heat and sugar.
The Closest Comparison
If you need a single comparison to set your expectations: imagine a ripe pineapple crossed with strawberry and guava, eaten in a room full of flowers. That gets you about 80% of the way there. The remaining 20% is the part that’s just feijoa, a minty, herbal undertone and a perfumed intensity that no other fruit quite matches. It’s the kind of flavor people either become obsessed with or find slightly strange, and there’s not much middle ground.