Durian Grades Explained: A, B, C, CC, CCC and AAA

You will almost never be offered a durian by its official class. You will be offered a letter. At a stall in Singapore that letter is usually AAA, AA or Grade A. From a farm or collection station in Malaysia it is A, AB, B, C, and below those CC and CCC.

No government body or standards body defines any of them. There are two written durian standards, both real and one of them free, and almost nothing sold in Singapore is labelled using either. So this page starts with the letters you are actually handed, then shows what the written standards say, so you can see the gap for yourself.

The letters you are actually quoted

The trade letters are broadly tracking the same two things the written standards care about, how many chambers filled out and what condition the fruit is in. The difference is that nobody has written down where one letter stops and the next begins, so they are not portable. One farm’s B and the next farm’s B need not match, and neither is required to tell you what they measured.

Where one letter actually stops and the next begins

Since no body publishes these, the only way to see the boundaries is to look at how a working buyer applies them. The bands below are one Malaysian operator’s own buying spec, used at collection stations where fruit from many farms is sorted on arrival. Treat it as first-hand trade practice rather than a rule, because another buyer an hour up the road may cut it differently.

Read down the top three rows and the ladder gives itself away. The letter is a chamber count before it is anything else, five for A, four and a half for AB, four for B, with weight following along because a fruit with more filled chambers weighs more. That is why the same buyer will refuse a fruit on shape alone whatever it weighs, and why Black Thorn is bought against slightly heavier bands than these, since the variety runs larger.

The A row has an unwritten ceiling as well as a floor. Six or seven filled chambers still counts as an A, but a Musang King much beyond about 3kg is normally an unripe one, and a buyer working to this spec downgrades it to B rather than paying A money for it, however round it looks. So the band is a window, not a target: the largest fruit on the table is rarely the best one on it.

One line in that spec is worth pulling out on its own, because it runs against the instinct that bigger is better: a B that is too big is usually starchy, the trade description being that it eats like sweet potato. Within a letter, the top of the weight range is not the pick of it. That is the closest thing in the whole ladder to a flavour signal, and it points down rather than up.

You may also see the letter carrying an m, as in Cm, CCm or CCCm. The m is for mao, and it is trade shorthand rather than a separate grade, so a CCm is a CC.

What the letters are worth

The steps between them are real money. Reporting from the December 2025 glut gives the shape. China Press quoted the president of the Malaysia Durian Exporters Association on farm-gate prices of RM32 per kg for A, RM28 for B and RM23 for C, with CC and CCC as the thinner-fleshed grades below those.

Read the ratios, not the absolute numbers. That was a crash year and the level moves every season. What holds is the shape, a steady step down at each letter.

The volumes are the part most people have not seen. Sin Chew Daily quoted a grower saying only around 10% of a crop grades A or AB, while up to 90% grades C, CC or CCC and sells under RM16 per kg. A tree mostly produces the grades a whole-fruit retailer least wants to sell.

The letter is not a taste score

This is the part worth carrying into a shop. Every written standard scores shape, chamber count and condition, at the point the fruit is still closed, because that is the only point a grader can judge it without opening it. Not one of them mentions sweetness, bitterness or aroma.

So a grade C off a good tree tastes like a grade A off the same tree. It is smaller, it carries less flesh, and it looks less impressive when cracked open. None of that is a flavour claim, and grade cannot lower a flavour it never measured.

What a lower letter does cost you is yield. Fewer filled chambers means less flesh per kilo of whole fruit, so the honest comparison between two grades is cost per kilo of flesh, not cost per kilo of durian. That matters most if you are buying to process rather than to serve whole, which is covered in the guide to durian for professional kitchens, alongside wholesale pricing.

It goes furthest for anything blended. Shape, size and how impressive the open fruit looks are the things a grade is scoring, and none of them survive being turned into purée. A kitchen paying a premium grade for purée is paying for attributes it is about to destroy, so there the only number that matters is cost per kilo of flesh.

What the written standards say

Two documents exist. Neither is what your stall is using, and both are worth knowing because they show what a trained grader is actually looking at.

The standard that actually exists

The regional standard is the ASEAN Standard for Durian, published as ASEAN Stan 1:2006 and revised in 2012. It is a free public document and it is the clearest place to see how graders are meant to think.

It sorts durian into three classes: “Extra”, Class I and Class II. The dividing line is the number of fertile locules, which the standard defines precisely as a locule whose “external appearance is visibly fully developed throughout the length of the fruit”. In plain terms, a segment that filled out properly along the whole fruit rather than staying flat and empty.

“Extra” needs a minimum of four. Class I needs three, without the shortfall distorting the shape of the fruit. Class II needs two. Two Thai varieties, Garnyao and Gradoomtong, need one more in every class.

Thorn condition carries weight too. Both “Extra” and Class I require thorns to be well developed with no splitting at the tip.

Below all three sits a set of minimum requirements every durian must meet regardless of class: whole, with the stem intact, fresh in appearance, free of foreign smell or taste, and free of damage from pests or from heat and cold. The standard also names three internal faults by name, hardened pulp, tip burn and water core, and allows them to total no more than 5% of the edible portion.

Size is graded separately from quality

A common misreading is that a bigger durian is a better grade. It is not. Size is its own scale in the standard, running from code 1 down to code 5:

So a fruit can be Class I, size 4. The two say different things, and a seller quoting only one of them has told you half the story.

The standard also publishes expected weight ranges, for 28 named varieties across seven countries. D24 is listed at 1.0 to 3.0 kg, and so is Musang King, under its clone number D197, along with D99, D145 and D169. The Thai varieties run heavier, with Montong at 1.5 to 6.0 kg and Chanee and Garnyao at 1.5 to 4.0.

Two things follow from that. There is an official expected weight for Musang King, so anyone telling you no such figure exists is wrong. And it is the same figure as D24’s, so weight on its own will never tell those two apart.

The part that surprises people: a graded box is allowed to be wrong

The standard builds in tolerances. An “Extra” shipment may contain up to 5% by number that does not meet “Extra” but meets Class I. Class I and Class II shipments each allow up to 10% by number falling to the class below. Size carries its own 10% tolerance, one size step either way.

That is normal practice for any fresh produce standard, and it is the honest reason a box graded uniformly can still hold a fruit that disappoints. It is not necessarily a cheat.

Malaysia has two standards, and one of them is free

Malaysia’s national standard is MS 2431, “Fresh durian - Specification”, published in 2011 and revised in 2022. Its existence is not in doubt: the ASEAN standard lists MS 2431:2011 in its own references, and it appears in the Department of Standards Malaysia catalogue. We have not read the full text, because it is a paid document, so this page does not quote its tables. Treat any specific MS 2431 weight table you find quoted online with care. We found several circulating versions that contradicted each other on the numbers.

There is a second document, and it is free to download. The Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority publishes FAMA Standard FS 092:2018, written specifically for Musang King. We have read it, and the figures below come from the document itself rather than from a summary of it.

It sets three grades, and the interesting part is where the line falls.

Premium and Grade 1 demand the same number of filled chambers. What separates them is how clean and undamaged the fruit is, not how full it is. So the step up to Premium buys condition and appearance rather than more flesh, which is worth knowing before paying for the word.

The same standard sizes the fruit, and these are the numbers most often got wrong online:

A 2kg Musang King is a large one by Malaysia’s own reckoning, not an average one.

So Malaysia’s official classification for Musang King is Premium, Gred 1 and Gred 2, not the letters at the top of this page. A, AB, B, C, CC and CCC sit alongside it as trade language and are not written down anywhere.

One caution follows directly from that, and it matters if you sell durian as well as buy it. Because FAMA does define a grade called Premium, the word is not a pure invention the way AAA is. But it only means anything if that fruit was actually graded against FS 092, which a stall in Singapore has almost certainly not done. “Premium” or “Premium Plus” chalked on a sign is still the seller’s own claim unless they can tell you who graded it and against which document.

There is a third Malaysian standard, MS 1322, which covers durian clonal planting materials. That one is about budwood and grafted plants, not fruit you eat.

A D number is not a grade

This is the confusion worth clearing up. D24, D197 and D175 are variety registrations, not quality marks. They come from a different system run for a different reason.

Malaysia’s Department of Agriculture registers durian varieties, a role it has held since the 1930s. A D number identifies genetics: which tree this fruit’s parent material came from. It says nothing about whether this particular fruit filled out, when it was picked, or how it was handled.

A poorly developed D197 and an excellent D24 are both exactly what their numbers say they are. Variety and grade are independent, and you need both to know what you are buying. Our durian register covers the variety half.

So what is AAA?

A shop’s own label. No government body, standards body or trade association anywhere defines AAA, AA, Grade A or Premium Plus for durian. The letters borrow their authority from conventions people already recognise from credit ratings and battery sizes.

That does not automatically make a AAA stall dishonest. A seller may well apply their letters consistently and mean something real by them. The problem is that the letters are not portable. One shop’s Grade A and the shop next door’s Grade A are not measuring the same thing, and neither is required to tell you what they measured.

Malaysia’s own industry accepts this gap. Reporting on the trade has repeatedly described on-farm grading as inconsistent, and a properly enforceable national durian grading standard has been proposed rather than delivered. As of August 2026, no unified enforced on-farm grading system exists.

What happens at the orchard

There is no single official procedure, so what follows is documented trade practice rather than a written rule.

Fruit is usually sorted first by the farm, then again by the collector who buys it, and most rigorously at a packing house if it is heading for export. The criteria in practice are the ones the standard also cares about, plus a few it does not: weight, overall shape, segment count, and the condition of the stem, since a fresh green stem points to recent harvest and a dark dry one does not. Cracks, worm holes and blunted spikes from impact all push fruit down.

Growers have complained publicly about opaque downgrading at the collector stage, which is what you would expect when the grade being applied is not defined anywhere.

Export to China raised the bar, for exports only

Malaysia gained access to China for fresh whole durian on 19 June 2024, under a phytosanitary protocol signed between Malaysia’s Minister of Agriculture and Food Security and the head of China’s General Administration of Customs. Before that, only frozen pulp and frozen whole fruit could go.

That protocol requires registered orchards and registered packing houses, each with its own number, and traceability from orchard to shipment. It is worth understanding what that is and is not. It is a food safety and traceability regime, not a quality grade. A registered orchard number tells you the fruit can be traced, not that it is good.

None of it applies to fruit sold domestically in Malaysia or exported to Singapore.

Singapore has no durian grade at all

The Singapore Food Agency regulates durian as food safety, not as quality. Its interest is pesticide residues, ripening agents and licensed importers, under the Sale of Food Act and the rules covering imported fresh fruit and vegetables.

No Singapore regulation grades durian or governs what a stall may call its fruit. Every grade label you see in Singapore is trade convention.

What to ask a seller

Since the letters are not standardised, the useful question is not “what grade is this” but what the seller’s grade measures.

• What does your grade actually measure? Weight, segment count, appearance, or the buyer it was picked for. Any honest answer is useful. A refusal to answer is also useful.
• How many segments filled out? This is the criterion the real standard uses, and it is visible from the outside once you know to look.
• When did it drop? Ripeness and grade are separate. A high grade picked four days ago is not what you want tonight.
• Which clone, by number? Not the brand name. Our register exists because the same fruit is sold under several names.

Sources and how this page is maintained

The class definitions, locule counts, size codes and tolerances on this page are quoted from the ASEAN Standard for Durian (ASEAN Stan 1:2006, Rev.1-2012), published by ASEAN and free to download. The definition of a fertile locule is that document’s own wording. Read it yourself and check us.

MS 2431 and MS 1322 are listed in the Department of Standards Malaysia catalogue, and MS 2431:2011 appears in the ASEAN standard’s reference list. We have deliberately not quoted figures from inside MS 2431, because it is a paid document we have not read.

Variety registration is the Department of Agriculture Malaysia’s function. The China export position is taken from that same department’s own published protocol document, dated 19 June 2024, covering phytosanitary requirements for exporting fresh durian to China. Singapore’s position is the Singapore Food Agency’s, whose durian remit is safety rather than grading.

The A, B, C, CC and CCC letters are trade convention, so there is no standard to cite for them. The prices attached to them here come from two named reports of the December 2025 season: China Press on 26 December 2025, quoting the president of the Malaysia Durian Exporters Association on farm-gate prices, and Sin Chew Daily on 28 December 2025, quoting a grower on the share of a crop that reaches each letter. Both are linked in full where they are used. They describe one season in a glut year, and we say so rather than presenting them as a standing price list.

The chamber and weight bands per letter, the note on oversized B fruit, and the m suffix come from a different kind of source and are labelled as such on the page itself: the working buying spec of a Singapore durian operator with years of buying at Malaysian collection stations, given to us first-hand. No published document states them, because none exists. We have set them out as one buyer’s practice rather than as a rule, and a reader who is quoted different bands elsewhere is not being misled by either party.

Where this page describes what happens at an orchard, it is reporting trade practice from that same first-hand account, and says so, because no written national procedure exists to cite.

This page was last checked on 15 August 2026.

Related

• Durian types and their D numbers, the variety half of the question
• How to choose a durian, at the stall rather than on paper
• Red Prawn (D175), and the clone usually sold in its place
• Durian season 2026, because timing moves quality more than grade
• All durian guides