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Sea Grapes Are Southwest Florida’s Most Overlooked Fruit

Long used across the Caribbean and South Florida, the native sea grape offers tart flavor, antioxidant benefits and deep local roots.

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You’ve seen Coccoloba uvifera everywhere—lining dunes, shading coastal boulevards, threaded through neighborhood landscapes. But despite its ubiquity, many Southwest Floridians don’t realize the culinary and nutritional potential of the plant, best known as a sea grape.

In late summer and early fall, the tree’s hanging clusters ripen from green to deep purple, signaling the fruit’s velvety, translucent pulp is ready to eat. Local food legend Don Splain describes the ripe fruit as tangy and lightly floral. “It looks like one of the most voluptuous grapes I’ve ever seen,” he says. 

The pods hold more seed than flesh, so he often cooks the fruit down into a sweet-and-salty jelly similar to that made from Concord grapes. The process is simple in theory—boil, strain, reduce—but the fruit’s thick seed and thin pulp make it a surprisingly labor-intensive endeavor. When he’s looking for the fullest expression of the tree itself, he reaches for sea grape honey—a hyperlocal variant some South Florida beekeepers produce—or brews sea grape kombucha for a digestion-friendly kick.

For millennia, communities throughout Florida, the Caribbean and South America have turned to the sea grape for nourishment and medicine. Traditional healers brewed tea from the tree’s leaves for throat irritation and digestive discomfort, while bark decoctions were used topically to treat rashes and wounds.

Because the fruit isn’t commonly grown commercially and each globe yields only a thin ring of pulp, scientific research on its nutritional value is limited—and often muddied by studies of an unrelated Asia-Pacific seaweed that shares the “sea grape” name. Botanically, the sea grape is closer to buckwheat than to the grape it resembles, yet its chemistry falls squarely in the wild-fruit realm, with fiber and anthocyanins that lend color and antioxidant activity. A 2015 study in the Journal of Chemistry found the tart fruit’s phenolic compounds deliver antioxidant levels comparable to familiar fruits like apples and oranges.

Sourcing the fruit takes some navigating. Because sea grapes help stabilize the coastline, it’s illegal to harvest them from public or private lands without permission. And while the shrubs are everywhere in Southwest Florida, most are kept neatly clipped for landscaping and never reach the broad canopy needed to produce meaningful fruit. Mature, fruit-heavy trees tend to survive only in older pockets like Lowdermilk Park and the remaining coastal hammocks. “Those habitats are so rare now, because of development,” landscape designer and kitchen gardener Erica Klopf notes.

For most people, the most reliable access is through growers. Don checks with insiders Jenny and David Burd at the Third Street South Farmers Market when the fruit is in season. Prepared products—like the sea grape honey from Harold P. Curtis Honey Co. and sea grape jelly from Pine Island’s Momma Donna—are easier to find. If you’re curious about cooking with the fruit yourself, planting a tree is surprisingly viable: Nursery stock can fruit within a few years, and even a single tree can produce several gallons when mature. Erica notes that planting sea grapes carries a deeper payoff. Bringing these native trees back into home landscapes helps restore the habitats that once supported Florida’s coastal forests.

It also keeps a native food source within reach, which carries its own health logic. Foods that are grown where we live are fresher, require fewer inputs and reflect the nutrients of the local soil. Bringing them onto the plate also reinforces a sense of belonging, bringing us a step closer to the land and linking our personal health to the health of our ecosystem. “I’m a firm believer that if I’m living in this area, I should be eating the things local to the area,” Don says.