Gallery: Meet China's baby-shaped pears and heart-shaped melons

Baby-shaped pears, heart-shaped watermelons and square apples are hitting supermarkets in China and Japan. But are these fruits just frivolous fun?

Since the beginnings of agriculture, humans have been customising their fruits and vegetables to suit their needs. Early on, bigger fruits and higher yields were the most important considerations,and while these factors still outweigh the actual taste factor, other, slightly less pressing desires have come into play over the past decade or so.

Namely, people want to eat fruit that doesn’t look like regular fruit.

Which is how baby-shaped pears have come into existence. Grown by China-based manufacturing company, Fruit Mould Co., these strange little shapes have been selling like crazy in China, along with square-shaped apples, and heart-shaped watermelons and cucumbers. Their Buddha-shaped pears are apparently extremely popular.

The way these fruits are created, says Carl Engelking at Discover Magazine, is by placing very young fruits - still attached to their vines or branches - into a plastic mould. The moulds are then clamped shut with screws and shielded from direct sunlight using a sheet of tough, water-proof paper.

At a certain point in the fruit’s maturity, the mould can be removed and the fruit will continue growing into the desired shape. This last bit can be very tricky, and farmers have spent many years getting the final shapes right. According to Brian Ashcraft at Kotaku, it took farmers in Japan three years to perfect their version of the heart-shaped watermelon.

While this all looks like some frivolous fun, there is the opportunity to apply practical applications to this technology. Packing round fruits for transportation, storage, and display in supermarkets takes up lots of space, which means more money and trucks on the road, and securing their roly-poly shapes in trucks and display spaces takes time. The square watermelon idea originally came to be because Japanese supermarkets don't have a lot of room to display their large, round shapes, so local farmers developed easily-stackable square ones. Of course, they're around three times more expensive than regular watermelons, presumably due to the amount of work that went into their development, but as the technology ages, the prices should eventually come down.