Karwan Bazar jamun juice goes to exporters, and the seeds sell as powder

Before dawn had fully reached the city, the day's work had already begun at Karwan Bazar in Dhaka. Bamboo baskets were piled high with black-purple jamun, the black plum known in Bangladesh as jam. In one corner people sorted ripe fruit by hand; in another the fruit was being pressed into a deep purple juice. A little further on stood a basket heaped with pink-stained seeds. Bags of juice were being stacked on one side and seeds collected on the other, as if one fruit had two separate fates. The juice, traders said, travels abroad, while the seeds stay in the country; but the seeds are not waste either, because a market of their own has grown up around them. Jagonews24 published this account by Khairul Bashar Ashik on 16 July 2026, in the middle of the jamun season.

Every monsoon, the report said, truckloads of jamun come to the capital from orchards in Rajshahi, Natore, Jashore, Kushtia, Meherpur and the hill districts. To most people jamun means a seasonal fruit or a glass of sherbet from a roadside stall. In one part of Karwan Bazar, however, the fruit has another identity: it is raw material, a business and a chain of labour.

Traders at Karwan Bazar told Jagonews24 that 8 to 10 tonnes of jamun arrive at the market every day. Part of it is sold directly as fruit. Even after those sales, juice is extracted from roughly 2 tonnes of jamun a day, more or less. That juice then goes to juice manufacturers, wholesalers or exporters.

While most of the city sleeps, preparation for another day begins at Karwan Bazar. Time here runs by different rules: the demand for goods, not the city's clock, sets the hours. The work starts at four in the morning. Some workers unload baskets from the trucks, some wash the fruit, some press out the juice and others pack it. The work goes on past noon into the evening, and sometimes into the night.

The jamun is sorted first. Good, fully ripe fruit is set aside, and spoilt or overly soft fruit is removed. The fruit is then washed, pressed for its juice and strained. Once the juice has been separated, the seeds and some pulp are left behind. Huge baskets of purple-stained seeds look as though someone had poured paint over them, though the colour comes from pressing hundreds of kilograms of jamun. The heap of seeds shows how much fruit goes into every bag of juice. The packed bags of dark purple juice are then stacked in boxes, one after another.

The juice itself is not new to food science. In her reference work Fruits of Warm Climates (1987), the American botanist Julia F. Morton wrote that all but decidedly inferior jambolan fruits have been used for juice, which she described as much like grape juice. She noted that when juice is drawn from cooked fruit, letting it drain out without squeezing makes it less astringent. Good-quality juice, she wrote, is excellent for sherbet, syrup and "squash", and in India squash is a bottled drink made by cooking the crushed fruit, pressing out the juice, combining it with sugar and water, and adding citric acid and sodium benzoate as a preservative.

Morton also described how astringent the fruit can be. Its flavour, she wrote, varies from acid to fairly sweet, and fruits with purple flesh are more astringent than white-fleshed types. Astringent fruits become more palatable when they are soaked in salt water, or pricked, rubbed with a little salt and left to stand for an hour. The purple-fleshed fruit, the common kind, makes a richly coloured jelly but is short of pectin, so a jelling agent or a pectin-rich fruit such as an unripe guava has to be added. In Goa and the Philippines, she recorded, jambolans are an important source of wine, and jambolan vinegar is made throughout India.

According to the traders, a large part of the packed juice goes to juice manufacturers or to exporters. Jagonews24 wrote that as demand for Bangladeshi fruit grows in the Middle East and other countries, the market for processed products of this kind is widening. Besides expatriates' attachment to the fruits of home, the report said, jamun juice has found demand among health-conscious consumers, so that the seasonal fruit is no longer confined to the domestic market and, in processed form, is finding a place abroad. The report gave no separate figure for jamun juice exports, and none of the official sources consulted for this article lists one.

The wider trend in fruit exports had been described earlier in 2026. On 19 January 2026 the national news agency BSS, analysing data from the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), reported that Bangladesh earned only USD 0.58 million from fruit exports in fiscal year 2021-22, and USD 67.51 million in 2024-25. In the same analysis, the EPB data put total agricultural export earnings at USD 988.62 million in 2024-25, after USD 827 million in 2022-23 and USD 964 million in 2023-24. Vegetable exports earned USD 81.12 million that year, beverages USD 35.47 million and spices USD 56.31 million.

The same BSS report said Bangladeshi farm products went to more than 130 countries, with India the largest destination at USD 211.47 million in 2024-25, followed by Saudi Arabia at USD 114.03 million. Exports to the United Arab Emirates amounted to USD 74 million that year. A deputy director (export) of the Plant Quarantine Wing of the Department of Agricultural Extension told BSS that many countries want to import fruits such as jackfruit and pineapple from Bangladesh and that demand is steadily rising.

The same report set out the obstacles. A director of the EPB's Policy and Planning Division told BSS that Bangladesh has no dedicated cargo aircraft for agricultural exports, that farm products travel on passenger aircraft, and that the facilities needed for exporting perishable products are not available in air transport. He said Bangladesh lags well behind the sanitation standards that developed countries maintain for agricultural products, and that Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) are essential: if farmers receive more training on sanitation, he said, demand for Bangladeshi farm products will rise further. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, lists the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman among the destinations for Bangladesh's seasonal fruits.

Many people once regarded jamun seeds as waste. After the juice was pressed out, they were thrown away or left to rot. That had begun to change. Traders told Jagonews24 that jamun seeds now sell too. The seeds are dried and ground into powder, which, they said, fetches quite a good price in the domestic market, and there is demand for it in particular as a herbal ingredient for controlling diabetes. A part of the fruit that was once neglected is gaining economic value.

The trade in the seeds is old. Morton wrote in 1987 that jambolan seeds, marketed in pieces about 7 mm long, and the bark were shipped from India, Malaya and Polynesia, and to a small extent from the West Indies, to pharmaceutical supply houses in Europe and England. She listed the seeds' reported constituents as 6.3 to 8.5 percent protein, 1.18 percent fat, 16.9 percent crude fibre, 41 percent starch, 6.1 percent dextrin and 6 to 19 percent tannin, along with calcium and phosphorus.

The diabetes demand that traders describe rests on long tradition rather than settled proof. A historical review by Axel Helmstädter of Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, published in the journal Pharmazie in 2008, said Syzygium cumini belongs to the medicinal plants most often recommended as an add-on therapy in type 2 diabetes, and that about 100 case reports had appeared before insulin was discovered. After the Second World War, the review said, research moved to animal studies, many but not all of which reported some success in reducing symptoms. It concluded that a state-of-the-art clinical study was still missing, and it listed gastrointestinal disturbances among the adverse effects to be expected.

Controlled trials in people have not confirmed the effect. A team at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, reported in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 2000 that a tea of jambolan leaves had no effect on blood sugar in a randomised, placebo-controlled trial in 30 young volunteers without diabetes, and concluded that jambolan could not, for the time being, be recommended as a treatment to lower blood sugar. In a later double-blind randomised trial by the same group, published in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics in 2006, 27 patients with type 2 diabetes were followed for 28 days: fasting blood sugar fell with the standard drug glyburide but did not change with the jambolan leaf tea or with a placebo.

Evidence on the seed itself is thinner. A pilot study at Punjab Agricultural University in India, published in the Journal of Medicinal Food in 2005, gave 60 men with non-insulin-dependent diabetes a powdered mixture of bitter gourd, jamun seed and fenugreek seed for three months and reported lower blood sugar, but the three ingredients were given together, so the result cannot be credited to the jamun seed alone. A 2013 review in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture summarised the antidiabetic and other properties reported for the fruit as an overview of experimental evidence. Morton noted that the seeds and bark are rich in tannin and that excessive oral intake of tannin-rich plant products can be dangerous to health.

So the market demand for jamun seed powder is not proof that it treats diabetes. It is not a substitute for prescribed treatment, and anyone with diabetes should talk to a doctor before taking it or any other herbal product.

Jamun is the fruit of Syzygium cumini, a tree of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae). Morton listed its many names, among them Java plum, black plum, Malabar plum and Indian blackberry, and gave its native range as India, Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Andaman Islands. Banglapedia describes the black plum (kalo jam) as a large fruit tree whose fruits are almost black when ripe, elongated and marble-sized, with a seed almost half the size of the fruit, harvested in July. It counts the fruit among the most widely cultivated in Bangladesh and names May, June and July as the country's fruit-festival months, when almost all major and minor fruits are ripe.

Morton described a fast-growing tree that reaches full size in about 40 years and can grow to 30 metres in India, usually forking into several trunks near the ground. Its fragrant flowers come in clusters and its fruits hang in groups of a few up to 40, turning from green to light magenta and then to dark purple or nearly black as they ripen. The pulp is very juicy and normally holds one oblong seed up to 4 cm long. She recorded two common types in India: Ra Jaman, with large, oblong, dark-purple fruit, sweet pink pulp and small seeds, and Kaatha, with small, acid fruit. In Bangladesh, a dean of the agriculture faculty at Patuakhali Science and Technology University told The Daily Star in July 2021 that improved or hybrid jamun varieties were not grown commercially in that region, so all the jamun in the market there was of local varieties.

The tree, Morton wrote, grows best where rainfall is heavy, prospers on river banks and can withstand prolonged flooding, yet becomes drought-tolerant once established; dry weather is preferred while it flowers and fruits. Seeds lose their viability quickly, are sown in the rainy season in India and germinate in about two weeks. Seedlings begin bearing in 8 to 10 years and grafted trees in 4 to 7. The fruit is picked by hand as it ripens, over several pickings. Fruit flies attack the fruit, and birds and other animals eat it eagerly.

The tree has uses beyond its fruit. Morton noted that its flowers are rich in nectar and visited by bees, that its leaves have served as fodder, that its bark yields brown dyes and 8 to 19 percent tannin used in tanning leather and preserving fishing nets, and that its wood, durable in water, is used in India for beams, posts, boats and farm implements. Banglapedia lists jam among Bangladesh's timber trees.

The United States Department of Agriculture's FoodData Central database (SR Legacy, 2019) gives the nutrient values of raw jambolan, or Java plum. A 100-gram portion contains:

• 60 kilocalories of energy and 83.1 grams of water
• 15.6 grams of carbohydrate, 0.72 gram of protein and 0.23 gram of fat
• 14.3 milligrams of vitamin C
• 79 milligrams of potassium, 19 milligrams of calcium, 17 milligrams of phosphorus, 15 milligrams of magnesium, 14 milligrams of sodium and 0.19 milligram of iron
• small amounts of B vitamins: 0.26 milligram of niacin, 0.038 milligram of vitamin B6, 0.012 milligram of riboflavin and 0.006 milligram of thiamin

Morton's table of analyses from Asia and tropical America gives similar ranges and notes that the fruit also contains gallic acid and tannin, which give it its astringent taste.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), which lists jamun as "black berry", published its Yearbook of Agricultural Statistics 2025 in June 2026. Its national table of fruit crops puts the jamun area at 13,261.57 acres and production at 48,049.57 metric tonnes in 2024-25. For 2023-24 it gives 12,824.85 acres and 53,193.85 tonnes, and for 2022-23 it gives 12,626.15 acres and 53,343.93 tonnes. In the same yearbook, the country's total fruit production, temporary and permanent crops together, was 7,519 thousand tonnes in 2024-25.

The yearbook also records the harvest-time prices farmers received. In 2024-25 the national average farm-gate price of jamun was Tk 8,707 per 100 kg in May, Tk 9,813 in June, Tk 10,125 in July and Tk 7,625 in August, with an annual average of Tk 9,067 per 100 kg.

Earlier reports show how a jamun season works for a grower. In July 2021 The Daily Star reported on a farmer in Karaitala village of Barguna Sadar upazila who had planted 50 jamun saplings after Cyclone Sidr in 2007; that year 43 of his trees bore fruit. From the last week of May he picked an average of eight maunds a day. Early in the season a maund sold for Tk 8,000, but the price fell as supply rose, and his last sales were at Tk 2,000 a maund. The report said he earned about Tk 15 lakh in a single season, sold most of the crop online and sent orders to Barishal, Dhaka and Rajshahi by bus and launch, and that jamun cultivation cost him very little.

Karwan Bazar is a wholesale market near the Farmgate area of Dhaka. According to Banglapedia, it was founded in the late eighteenth century by Kawran Sing, a Marwari merchant, and in the late nineteenth century it became a place for selling pottery, crockery and household goods before growing and moving to a larger open site under its present name. Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue runs along its west side.

Banglapedia describes hundreds of small temporary shops in and around the market and separate blocks for wholesale trade in fish, vegetables and rice. Goods come from all over Bangladesh, and every night hundreds of trucks bring them to the market's shops, while vans and pushcarts carry them on to buyers. Traders here supply markets across Dhaka and its suburbs and also export vegetables, fish and other farm goods abroad, especially to the Middle East. The encyclopedia puts the market's daily transactions at almost Tk 50 million.

The quietest partners in the whole operation, Jagonews24 wrote, are the workers. The morning market comes alive in their hands, and the day's work ends in their hands too. Hour after hour, the jamun sap stains their hands and feet black, and standing or sitting at work for long stretches leaves many of them exhausted. Yet this seasonal work also gives many workers a chance of extra income.

Looking at a basket full of seeds, the report observed, another unseen story lies inside the market: workers' stained hands, wet floors, people standing at work for hours, and a fruit being transformed. When people buy a bottle of jamun sherbet from a shop, or hear success stories of fruit sent abroad, they rarely think of these seeds, or of the labour that goes on in the lanes of Karwan Bazar from dawn until night. The juice reaches foreign countries, but the people behind it rarely reach the conversation; like the seeds, they often remain out of view, though this unseen work in the city survives in their hands.

Photo: Rajesh Dangi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Sources: Jagonews24, BSS (Export Promotion Bureau data), Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (Yearbook of Agricultural Statistics 2025), Banglapedia, Julia F. Morton: Fruits of Warm Climates (Purdue University), USDA FoodData Central, The Daily Star, Pharmazie, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics, Journal of Medicinal Food, Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture