How to have a column full of lists in pandas

I have a pandas dataframe as follows

fruit_name  color
apple       red
banana      yellow
orange      orange

Using this dataframe, I want to create a new dataframe as follows

name    fruit
Ben     ['apple', 'banana', 'orange']
Alex    ['apple', 'banana', 'orange']
Jude    ['apple', 'banana', 'orange']
May     ['apple', 'banana', 'orange']
...

For this, I tried the following

new_df = pd.DataFrame(columns=['name', 'fruit']
new_df['name'] = students['name']
new_df['fruit'] = fruits['fruits_name'].to_list()

I get the following error message

ValueError: Length of values (3) does not match length of index (10)

I want my final result as follows

name    fruit
Ben     apple
Ben     banana
Ben     orange
Alex    apple
Alex    banana
Alex    orange
...

I thought I would use the explode function once I have a column of lists. But I am stuck getting the dataframe with the column of lists.

>Solution :

What you are looking for is actually called a cross merge, available from Pandas 1.2.0+:

new_df = students[['name']].merge(fruits[['fruit_name']], how='cross')

Output:

    name fruit_name
0    Ben      apple
1    Ben     banana
2    Ben     orange
3   Alex      apple
4   Alex     banana
5   Alex     orange
6   Jude      apple
7   Jude     banana
8   Jude     orange
9    May      apple
10   May     banana
11   May     orange

Note if you’re stuck with earlier version, use the same key to merge:

new_df = (students[['name']].assign(key=1)
   .merge(fruits[['fruit_name']].assign(key=1), on='key')
   .drop('key', axis=1)
)