Image from USA Today.
The reason we have only one kind of banana – out of the 1,000+ found worldwide – is partly an issue of transportation: every banana type ripens differently and has widely varying levels of fragility. In the 1950s, when the “original” commercial banana, the Gros Michel, was going functionally extinct, Dole came up with the idea of bagging and boxing a potential replacement fruit – the Cavendish – in order to allow it to survive the long trip from the tropics to our stores. The plan worked, and the banana industry was saved.
Today, as disease ravages the global Cavendish crop, packing and shipping technologies are once again becoming key to replacing the commercial fruit. At the same time, bananas compete more and more with candy and other junk food at convenience stores, where branding and presentation beyond an oval sticker might be a plus (at least in terms of marketing.)
Del Monte and 7-Eleven seem to believe just that and have begun, at about 30 stores near the convenience store giant’s Dallas headquarters, a small retail test of bagged and branded bananas. The packaging is designed to extend the shelf-life of the fruit from two to five days. (I’m not sure how the convenience store chain came up with those timeframes, actually. Bananas should be able to stay on sale for more than 48 hours if handled properly.) “Our customers want yellow bananas — not brown,” Joseph DePinto, CEO of the convenience chain, told USA Today. (I’ve written about convenience store fruit before. It hasn’t really worked out that well for the big banana companies.)
Since I’m not in Texas, I haven’t handled the packaging, but from the picture, it looks a lot like something a high-end produce distributor called Melissa’s uses for plantain sold in California supermarkets; Chiquita also made a try with a similar form of packaging a few years ago. It used a membrane-like coating and a special device that separated the fruit; the system was designed by a Boston consultancy called Gen3 Partners; you can read about the product here.
In a published case study, Gen3 quotes Chiquita as saying: “We have been in business for over one hundred years. We need to shake up our markets with new innovation.” Environmentalists rightly see this kind of innovation as problematic, and I agree, but with mixed feelings. I’d be happy if the new wrappers somehow made the fruit a more likely buy – over junk food – at convenience stores.
The bigger issue is that new production technology is desperately needed in the banana world – though not necessarily to make the fruit a convenience store favorite. The fruit industry continues to rely on Cavendish, and only Cavendish. That fruit is doomed (read my book or see this article), and no amount of packaging can change that. But in order to save bananas as a consumer product, the industry will need to develop new technologies to deliver new bananas to consumers – just as Dole did fifty years ago, and tougher, ripeness-delaying packaging will be a part of that. Is this particular experiment a step in the right direction? Not sure – but it is a step.
