Amla vs Camu Camu vs Kakadu Plum: The Vitamin C Superfruits
If you rank fruits by vitamin C, the top of the list is not oranges or even kiwis. It is a handful of intense, sour, mostly forgotten fruits from three different continents. Amla is one of them. Here is how it sits among the giants.
The three contenders
- Amla (Phyllanthus emblica), from India and tropical Asia. Roughly 200 to 900 mg of vitamin C per 100 g depending on cultivar, commonly cited near 600 mg.
- Camu camu (Myrciaria dubia), from the Amazon. Often reported in the low thousands of milligrams of vitamin C per 100 g, among the highest of any fruit.
- Kakadu plum (Terminalia ferdinandiana), from northern Australia. Frequently cited as one of the very highest known, with figures that can run into the thousands of milligrams per 100 g.
By raw vitamin C alone, camu camu and kakadu plum can post higher headline numbers than amla. For context, a raw orange sits around 53 mg per 100 g (USDA FoodData Central).
The highest number on the chart does not automatically win. How you actually eat the fruit matters just as much.
Why the numbers are only half the story
Three things complicate the leaderboard.
First, variability. All three fruits show enormous range depending on ripeness, growing conditions, and how the sample was measured, so any single figure is a snapshot, not a fixed truth.
First place on a chart also says nothing about how you will consume it. Camu camu and kakadu plum reach most people as freeze-dried powders and are rarely eaten fresh. Amla, by contrast, is eaten whole, brined, candied, and pressed, in the many ways we cover in how to eat amla, inside living food traditions like chyawanprash and triphala.
And amla's vitamin C is notably stable, holding up relatively well to storage thanks to the fruit's tannins, which is part of why it built a culinary history rather than staying a lab curiosity.
The verdict
If you only want the biggest vitamin C number, camu camu and kakadu plum will out-headline amla. If you want a genuinely rich source you can actually eat, cook with, preserve, and build a daily ritual around, amla is hard to beat. All three are extraordinary. Only one of them has a thousand-year recipe box.
Meet it properly on the Amla hero page, or read amla and vitamin C for the full breakdown.
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