Sindhri mango: a complete guide from a Sindh orchard
What Sindhri is, how to tell a real one, when it is picked, how to ripen it, and how to buy it in Pakistan or abroad. Written by the family that grows it.
The short answer
Sindhri is a mango cultivar from lower Sindh, Pakistan. It is large, long and tapering, with smooth even golden skin and no red blush, honey sweet with acidity underneath, fibreless, and with an unusually small flat stone, so there is more fruit in one than its size suggests. It is picked from mid May to late June, a window of about six weeks. A ripe Sindhri stays firm enough to cut into clean cheeks, which is what separates it from Chaunsa. We have grown it at Village Tando Soomro, District Tando Allahyar, since 1930.
What a Sindhri is
Sindhri (سندھڑی) is a mango variety from Sindh, in the south of Pakistan. It is the province's best known fruit and, for a lot of people in Pakistan, the one the season is measured by. Large, long, golden, honey sweet, almost no fibre and a small flat stone.
The name is straightforward: it means "of Sindh".
We grow it at Village Tando Soomro in District Tando Allahyar, on an orchard the family planted in 1930. Sindhri is the variety we have grown longest and the one we know best, which is the reason this guide exists. Most of what is written about Pakistani mangoes online is written by people who sell them. This is written by the people who pick them.
If you only want the practical bits, jump to how to recognise a real Sindhri, the season, or how to ripen it.
How to recognise a real Sindhri
Plenty of fruit gets sold as Sindhri that is not. In a market stall, away from the tree, these are the things worth checking.
Shape
Long and oval, tapering towards the bottom rather than rounding off. A Sindhri is noticeably longer than it is wide. If the fruit is round and plump, it is far more likely to be a Chaunsa.
Skin
Smooth and an even golden yellow when ripe, with no red blush. A blush means it is something else, usually Chaunsa. The skin is thin and comes away cleanly.
Size
Large. Sindhri is one of the bigger commercial varieties, and a single fruit is often a portion on its own.
Smell
Fine and floral at the stem end rather than heavy. Chaunsa smells much stronger and sweeter from across a room. A Sindhri you have to pick up.
The stone
Small and thin. This is the part people notice when they cut one. There is more fruit in a Sindhri than its size suggests, because the stone takes up so little of it.
| Sindhri | Chaunsa | Sohnaro | Langro | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shape | Long, oval, tapering | Rounder, plump, full | Oval, even | Oval, slightly kidney-shaped |
| Skin when ripe | Smooth, uniform golden-yellow | Golden with a light blush | Golden, firm-looking | Stays green or greenish-yellow |
| Size | Large | Medium to large | Medium | Medium |
| Flesh | Tender, fibreless, firm-set | Very soft, juicy, fibreless | Firm, meaty, balanced | Very soft, fibreless, juicy |
| Sweetness | Honey-sweet, fragrant | Intensely sweet | Moderate, well-balanced | Sweet, with a slight tang |
| Aroma | Fine, floral | Strong, heady | Mild | Strong and distinctive |
| Stone | Small, thin | Medium | Medium | Medium, flat |
| In season | May to June | June to August | Early to mid June | Mid to late May |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
There is a longer head to head on the two most confused varieties in Sindhri vs Chaunsa.
Taste and texture
Honey sweet rather than sugary. There is an acidity underneath it that stops it being flat, which is what makes a good Sindhri worth eating slowly rather than in two bites.
The flesh is fibreless and firm-set. That last part matters more than people expect. A ripe Sindhri still holds its shape when you cut it, so you can score the cheeks into a grid and push the skin inside out and it stays together. A Chaunsa at the same stage will collapse. It is the reason Sindhri is the one we send when someone is serving guests, and Chaunsa is the one you eat over a sink.
Colour is the least reliable guide to ripeness. A Sindhri can look completely golden and still need three days. Press it gently with your whole palm: a ripe one gives slightly and springs back. There is more on this in ripening and storing mangoes at home.
The season, week by week
Sindhri is picked from the middle of May into late June. That is the window, and it is shorter than most people expect. If you want Sindhri specifically, you are looking at roughly six weeks.
| Period | What is happening |
|---|---|
| February | Flowering. This month decides the size of the crop five months later. |
| March to April | Fruit sets and fills out. Nothing is picked. |
| Mid to late May | Langro comes off first, a short two week window. |
| Mid May to June | Sindhri. The main harvest, and the one the year turns on. |
| Early to mid June | Sohnaro, another short window. |
| June to August | Chaunsa, which carries the rest of the summer and closes the season. |
| September onward | No fruit. The trees recover and next year's crop is already being set. |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
The exact start date moves every year. A mango harvest is observed, not scheduled: the February flowering sets it going and the weather between then and May decides whether picking starts in the second week of May or the fourth. We confirm the real date to people on the list before anyone else hears it.
Full detail in when is Sindhri mango season.
Where Sindhri grows
Sindhri is a lower Sindh mango. The belt runs through Mirpurkhas, Tando Allahyar, Tando Muhammad Khan and the districts around them, on the left bank of the Indus inland from Hyderabad.
Three things make it work here. The soil is Indus floodplain, deep and alluvial, built up over a very long time by a river carrying silt down from the north, which suits a tree that roots deep and stays in one place for fifty years. The Indus irrigation system reaches this part of Sindh, so an orchard is not left entirely to rainfall in a region that gets little. And the summer is long and properly hot, which is what builds the sugar.
That combination is why Sindhri is a Sindhi mango and not a Punjabi one. More on the district in mango orchards of Tando Allahyar.
Sindh and Punjab grow different mangoes
Pakistan's two mango regions are not interchangeable. Sindh is earlier and is where Sindhri belongs. Punjab, around Multan and Rahim Yar Khan, comes later and is the home of Chaunsa and Anwar Ratol. The marketing from each region tends to flatten this, so it is worth being plain about: if you are buying in May, you are almost certainly buying Sindhi fruit, whoever is selling it.
There is a wider survey of the varieties grown across the country in Pakistani mango varieties.
Why a single orchard matters
A lot of fruit sold under a brand name has been bought in from several growers and consolidated. There is nothing wrong with that, but it means the fruit in one box can come from different orchards picked on different days, and nobody in the chain can tell you which tree it came from.
Ours comes off one property that the family has worked since 1930. The practical difference is consistency and traceability rather than romance: the same trees, the same soil, the same people deciding when to pick.
How it is picked, graded and packed
Picking
By hand, with the stem cut rather than pulled. The fruit is kept out of the sun from the moment it is off the tree, and left stem down for a while so the sap runs out. Sap on the skin burns a mark that shows up days later and takes the fruit out of the export grade.
Fruit for people in Pakistan is picked riper than fruit going abroad, because it has less distance to travel. A box going to Karachi and a consignment going to London do not come off the same tree on the same day.
Grading
Everything is sorted by size, weight and appearance. Anything with a bruise, a blemish, sap burn or an odd shape comes out of the export line and goes to the local market. Export grade costs more because you are paying for everything that was rejected as much as for what was kept.
Packing
Single layers, so no mango sits on another one, in ventilated boxes, as close to the orchard as possible. Every extra handling step is another chance to bruise the fruit.
The full chain from orchard to an importer abroad is set out in how Pakistani mangoes reach the UK, UAE and US.
Grades, and what they actually mean
"Export grade" gets used loosely. On our orchard it means a specific thing: fruit that came through grading with no bruise, no blemish, no sap burn, an even shape and a size within the band for the pack it is going into. Everything that fails any of those goes to the domestic market instead.
That is not a quality judgement about the fruit you buy locally. A mango with a mark on the skin tastes identical. It is a judgement about whether it will survive being handled five more times and still look like something a shop can sell three thousand miles away.
The practical consequence for a buyer is that the export line is a smaller share of the crop than people assume, and in a bad year it is smaller still. A late cold spell at flowering or rain at the wrong moment does not just reduce the tonnage, it shifts the proportion that makes grade. For the same reason we do not publish a yield figure. The harvest moves too much between years for an average to tell you anything useful, and a confident number here would be a guess dressed up as a measurement.
Common problems, and what causes them
Black marks on the skin
Usually sap burn. When the fruit is picked, latex runs from the cut stem, and if it touches the skin it burns a mark that darkens over the following days. It is a handling fault at picking, not a disease, and it does not affect the flesh underneath. It does take the fruit out of the export grade.
The fruit went soft at the tip but stayed hard at the shoulder
Uneven ripening, almost always from cold at some point in the chain. Once a mango has been chilled below about ten degrees before it is ripe, the ripening never runs evenly again.
It smells fermented
Gone over. Mangoes move from ready to past it quickly, and a warm room shortens that further. Check daily once they start giving.
Stringy flesh
If it is genuinely fibrous, it is probably not a Sindhri. Sindhri and Chaunsa are both fibreless. Several cheaper varieties sold loosely in summer are not.
No smell at all
Not ready yet. Give it two or three more days on the counter. If it never develops a smell, it was picked too early.
A year on the orchard
Most of the year nothing appears to be happening, which is misleading. Winter is for pruning and getting the trees into shape. February brings the flowering and that is the month everything hinges on, because the number of flowers that set fruit decides the size of the crop five months later.
Through March and April the fruit fills out and the heat builds. By May the orchard is busy, and the whole thing compresses into a few weeks: picking, carrying, grading, packing, loading. Then it stops, and the trees are left alone to recover.
It is a lopsided way to make a living. Nearly all the income arrives in a quarter of the year and the other three quarters are spent looking after trees that are not producing anything yet. It is also why the 2027 list matters to us: knowing roughly what is wanted before the season starts changes how we plan it.
Ripening and storing a Sindhri
Leave them out on a counter, out of direct sun, in a single layer rather than piled up. Two to six days depending on how they arrived. A paper bag speeds it up, and a ripe banana in the bag speeds it up further.
Do not refrigerate an unripe mango. Cold stops the ripening and it does not restart properly, so you get fruit that softens without ever developing the sugar or the smell. That is the most common way a good mango gets wasted. Once it is ripe the fridge is useful and will hold it for a few days. Take it out an hour before eating, because cold flattens the flavour.
Remember Sindhri stays firmer than Chaunsa even at its best. Do not wait for it to go soft or you will miss it.
Full version, including what to do with a box that has arrived by air: how to ripen and store Pakistani mangoes.
What to do with them
Fresh
Stand the mango on its end, stone edge towards you, cut down either side to get two cheeks, score the flesh in a grid without going through the skin, and push the skin inside out. Sindhri holds up to this better than any of the others we grow.
Shakes and lassi
A mango shake in Pakistan is mango, cold milk, ice and nothing else. Sindhri works because it is sweet without being cloying, so the milk does not flatten it.
Gifting
A box of mangoes is a normal and well understood gift in Pakistan through the summer. People abroad send them home constantly. We handle that: see sending mangoes to family in Pakistan.
Trade
Importers, wholesalers and retail buyers can get in touch about the 2027 season through the export page.
Buying Sindhri
In Pakistan
We sell 5 KG boxes direct from the orchard. A Sindhri box is Rs. 3,599, and it is roughly a dozen mangoes depending on grade and fruit size. Sohnaro and Langro boxes are Rs. 2,000. The 2026 season is finished and the 2027 list is open, so joining it now means first choice of dispatch dates when picking starts in May. See the shop.
In the United Kingdom
Pakistani mangoes reach the UK by air from late May, with Sindhri usually among the first in. Our UK enquiries go to Shunaid Memon. See Pakistani mangoes in the UK.
In the Gulf
The UAE and the wider Gulf are the closest big export markets and the fruit arrives quickly. See Pakistani mangoes in the UAE.
In the United States
The US has its own import requirements and a shorter, later window. See Pakistani mangoes in the USA.
Which of our four should you actually order?
We grow four, and they are not interchangeable. If you are ordering once in a season, this is how we would steer you.
Order Sindhri if
You want the classic Sindh mango, you are serving it to people, or you want fruit you can slice cleanly. It is also the safest first order if you have never had Pakistani mangoes: it is the least polarising of the four.
Order Chaunsa if
You want the sweetest and the most aromatic, and you do not mind that it is soft and messy. A lot of people who grew up with Pakistani mangoes prefer it to Sindhri, and it runs latest, so it is the one still available in August.
Order Sohnaro if
You want something firmer and less sugary, or you are curious. Its window is about two weeks in early June and very few people outside Sindh have tried it. At Rs. 2,000 a box it is the cheapest way into the season.
Order Langro if
You want the first fruit of the year. It comes off in the second half of May, before anything else. It stays green when ripe, which throws people, so go by smell and give rather than colour.
What is actually in a box
A 5 KG box holds roughly a dozen mangoes. "Roughly" is doing real work in that sentence: the count depends on grade and fruit size, and a box of large Sindhri will have fewer fruit in it than a box of medium Sohnaro at the same weight. We pack by weight, not by count.
Boxes are packed in single layers so nothing sits on anything else, and they go out with the fruit still firm, so expect to ripen it at home over a few days rather than eating it the day it lands.
What we will not tell you
A few things get claimed about mangoes online that we are not going to repeat.
We do not publish sugar readings. Brix varies by fruit, by tree and by week, and a single number on a web page is marketing rather than information.
We do not claim to be the best mangoes in Pakistan. There are thousands of growers in Sindh and Punjab and plenty of them are very good. What we can say is that this is one family's orchard, we have grown Sindhri on it since 1930, and you can ask us exactly where any box came from.
We do not have customer reviews on this site because we have not collected any. When we do, they will be real ones.
Questions we get asked
What does Sindhri mango taste like?
Honey sweet with a fine floral aroma, and an acidity underneath that stops it being flat. The flesh is fibreless and firm-set, so it holds its shape when you cut it.
Is Sindhri the same as Chaunsa?
No. Sindhri is long and tapering with smooth even golden skin and a fine smell. Chaunsa is rounder and plumper, often with a light blush, much softer and far more strongly scented. Sindhri also comes earlier in the season.
When is Sindhri mango season?
Mid May into late June, about six weeks. The exact start moves each year depending on the February flowering and the weather that follows.
Is Sindhri fibreless?
Yes. So is Chaunsa. Sindhri is the firmer of the two, which makes it easier to slice cleanly.
How big is a Sindhri mango?
Large, and one of the bigger commercial Pakistani varieties. The stone is small and thin, so there is more fruit in one than its size suggests.
Why does my Sindhri look golden but taste bland?
It was probably picked under-ripe and then refrigerated. Cold stops the ripening process and it does not restart, so the fruit softens without developing sugar. Never put an unripe mango in the fridge.
Where does Sindhri grow?
Lower Sindh in Pakistan, through Mirpurkhas, Tando Allahyar and the districts around them. Our orchard is at Village Tando Soomro in Tando Allahyar.
Can I get Sindhri outside Pakistan?
Yes, mostly by air during the season. Availability depends on the market and the year. We supply importers and distributors directly.
How much is a box of Sindhri?
Rs. 3,599 for a 5 KG box from our orchard, which is roughly a dozen mangoes. Sohnaro and Langro boxes are Rs. 2,000.
How many mangoes are in a 5 KG box?
About a dozen, though it varies with grade and fruit size.