Custard Apple Season

Custard apples are in season in Australia from autumn through winter, with peak supply between April and August. The Sunshine Coast and Wide Bay Burnett regions in Queensland carry most of the crop, and the Yeppoon district in Central Queensland typically delivers the first fruit of the season. If you haven't seen one on the shelf yet in May, you're right on time. This is exactly when supply peaks.

Custard Apples are primarily a winter crop in Australia, with peak supply from April to August.

The custard apple grown commercially in Australia is technically an atemoya, a hybrid of the cherimoya (Annona cherimola) and the sugar apple (Annona squamosa), though no supermarket sign uses that name. Trees take 20 to 25 weeks from flowering to harvest in subtropical climates. Most varieties require hand pollination because the male and female parts of each flower don't mature at the same time, and the beetles that do the job naturally aren't reliably present in orchards. That hand-pollination step is a key reason the fruit carries a higher price than a mango of similar weight. Trees are grafted onto cherimoya rootstock and need warm, frost-free sites with good humidity. A stable subtropical range of 25–28°C during flowering produces the best fruit set, per the QLD DAF 1998 information kit.

Custard apples arrived in Australia in the nineteenth century and have been grown commercially for over 100 years. Australia has done more to develop and commercialise the atemoya than any other country. Commercial production runs along a narrow subtropical and tropical coastal corridor from the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland down to Lismore in northern NSW, with the Sunshine Coast as the largest single production area, according to Custard Apples Australia. Small pockets exist near the SA–Victoria border and north of Perth, but these are backyard and micro-commercial scale, not commercial, per ABC Gardening Australia (March 2026).

Australia is the world's largest commercial producer of the atemoya-type custard apple, per Custard Apples Australia Inc.. The industry produced 1,797 tonnes in 2024/25 with a farm-gate value of $9.8 million, up from $5.4 million a decade earlier even though volume has fluctuated rather than grown consistently. Queensland accounts for about 52% of production and NSW the remaining 48%, split across the Sunshine Coast, Wide Bay Burnett, Central Queensland, the Atherton Tablelands and the Northern Rivers. Sydney and Melbourne are the almost exclusive wholesale destinations, which means Queenslanders, once the fruit's heartland, have less access to it than southern city residents, as ABC Rural reported in May 2023. Imports are effectively zero and around 80 to 90 tonnes per year are exported, mostly to South-East Asia.