The corporate banana monoculture, based on the Cavendish variety – which accounts for 99% of the world’s export crop – is both doomed and dangerous. Diseases are striking the world crop, forcing increased used of pesticides (when the diseases are curable, which isn’t always the case.) Reliance on a single, commodity fruit makes it impossible to do anything but exploit workers and land – it would be too expensive to do otherwise. The banana industry, however, refuses to budge from the monoculture, for the most part, saying it is impossible to import any other variety in bulk.
But that’s exactly what is being done in so-called ethnic markets. Here’s a shot I took last month of an alternate variety, commonly known as “apple” bananas, being sold under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown.
What does this mean? The fruit comes from Del Monte, one of the world’s largest banana importers (though it isn’t a major presence in the U.S.) I’d ask the question: does “impossible” mean that systems really can’t be developed, or that the major banana outfits – Dole and Chiquita – are simply afraid (or lack the creativity) to run their banana business as anything but the boring, exploitative, and doomed entity of the past century?
By the way, those under-the-bridge fruit are amazingly good. Try one – let it ripen to a rather brown, speckled state, a little more than you might for a conventional banana – and you’ll be rewarded with complex flavor, creamy texture, and pure fruit satisfaction.
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.
PLUS: See the film in New York Wednesday, October 21, at 7:15 PM. Details here.
But still not cuddly. Image: Fresh Plaza
After pressure from the Swedish government - efforts to boycott the banana company were underway, with a strong chance they would spread to other EU nations – Dole dropped a lawsuit it had filed against Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his film, “BANANAS!*”, which tells the story of the company’s pesticide use in the 1970s and the damage that practice inflicted on Nicaraguan workers.
Here’s the full text of Dole’s statement:
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CALIFORNIA – October 14, 2009 Dole Food Company, Inc. today announced that it is dismissing its defamation lawsuit against filmmakers Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangård and WG Film AB in the Los Angeles Superior Court, relating to the film BANANAS!*.
Dole made its decision in light of the free speech concerns being expressed in Sweden, although it continues to believe in the merits of its case. Dole strongly believes in freedom of speech and expression, which are so important in Sweden and the United States. [Emphasis added. Dole's view of our own First Amendment rights is, apparently, mostly, afterthought.]
“While the filmmakers continue to show a film that is fundamentally flawed and contains many false statements we look forward to an open discussion with the filmmakers regarding the content of the film,” said C. Michael Carter, Dole’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel.
I wrote about Dole’s financial motivation for suppressing in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper earlier this month; the English version of the story is here. While this is a great win for the film, the question that has to be asked is why it took Swedish concerns about free speech to kill the court action. Unfortunately, I can answer that: institutions in the U.S. – ranging from our government to the Los Angeles Film Festival (which shamefully caved to Dole pressure and disavowed the film, a measure that seems all the more cowardly given this news), as well as much of our national media - generally didn’t see the banana company’s action as something worth questioning, let alone resisting.
What next? Well, if you happen to be in New York, you’ll have a chance to see the film this coming Wednesday, as part of the CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival. Gertten will be there to answer questions (I’m going to be in attendance, as well.) One hopes that U.S. distributors will now be more open to putting the film in widespread circulation.
It is important to remember that the Nicaraguan story continues, and Dole’s attempts to discredit those who’d hold it responsible for its actions remains underway, too, as the below ad, auto-placed alongside the Los Angeles Times account of the lawsuit’s end, shows.
One more thing: the Dole release states that the company “is dismissing” the lawsuit. Actually, the proper term is “dropping.” Only a judge can dismiss a suit, something that comes with finding that suit invalid. Standard corporate press release nano-literacy or Freudian admission of the dopiness of the strategy to begin with?
The following is the original English text of an article I wrote for Dagens Nyheter, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden. The story is about Dole’s attempt to stop the distribution of “BANANAS!*”, a documentary made by Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten that the banana company believes to be untrue. The film is about lawsuits filed against Dole by Nicaraguan workers claiming to have been injured by the company’s use of a pesticide called Nemagon, or DBCP. In 2007, those workers achieved a partial victory against the banana company – but a follow-up suit was dismissed earlier this year after lawyers for the fruit giant offered evidence that the lawyer for the laborers had falsified information (here’s one of many news accounts about the trial’s denouement.)
Here, I explain why I find that “evidence” unconvincing – and why Dole’s suit has roots not just in a century of banana industry history, but also in a business model that persists to this day. For background on the issue, have a look at the filmmaker’s timeline or at Dole’s entire page on Nemagon. More links below.
THE BURNING OF THE LA CEIBA, HONDURAS TOWN HALL in 1903 was the work of more than an ordinary arsonist. Gone in the flames were birth records, marriage certificates, and hundreds of other municipal documents. But the most valuable files lost were property deeds. All of a sudden, what was owned in the town and the fields around it was an open question. La Ceiba was surrounded by banana plantations, planted by an American businessman named Joseph Vaccaro. How strange it was, some residents said, that Mr. Vaccaro had grown bananas on land owned by others, promising a share of profits, and now there was no proof that the people he’d made commitments to owned anything at all. Stranger was that, following the inferno, many parcels into the hands of Mr. Vaccaro and his company, Standard Fruit.
The La Ceiba episode is little remembered. But I couldn’t help think of it as I stood on line at the Los Angeles International Film Festival last month, forced to read a carefully worded disclaimer in order to gain admittance to the documentary I’d come to see. The film told the story of Dole – Standard Fruit renamed itself in 1991 – and the company’s use of a toxic pesticide in the 1970s. The main character was an attorney representing Nicaraguan workers who claimed to have been injured by that pesticide, and their 2007 lawsuit against the banana company. The lawsuit – and the film – ends with the workers winning a $5.8 million jury award.
Standard Fruit founder and banana bad-ass Joseph Vaccaro; image: Louisiana State Archives
Two years later, a second banana case, filed by the same attorney, was dismissed after Dole investigators presented evidence that the attorney had committed fraud. At the film festival, it didn’t seem to matter that the accusation was being disputed, or that the case in question was not the one the film documented, or that the dangers of the chemical the banana workers were exposed to was well-established. Not even the filmmaker’s record of integrity – let alone responsibility a global event dedicated to the expression of ideas and creativity might have to those higher ideals – prevented the terrified festival from removing Fredrik Gertten’s “BANANAS!*” from competition.
Since then, Dole has sued Gertten, and if it succeeds, it is unlikely that the film will ever again be seen in America. Such an action leaves no smolders, no charred remains. But if if you understand the banana industry, you’ll understand that fire – real and virtual – is part of the business model.
YOU’VE JUST PAID FOR A BUNCH OF BANANAS. What you’ve purchased is the most popular fruit in the world, and the cheapest, in nearly every country they’re sold. This hasn’t happened by chance. Supreme affordability has been the industry’s driving strategy since the first bunches were delivered to an unfamiliar American public in the late 19th century. Companies like United Fruit – now Chiquita – and Standard Fruit had to teach the public what a banana was. Part of getting them to try this strange product was making it a bargain.
Bananas are a fragile, tropical product. They rot quickly. They are grown oceans from where they are sold and eaten, and need to be shipped under refrigeration. Like no other fruit, bananas are heavily advertised and marketed. In other words, bananas should be expensive.
The best place for the banana companies to save money was where the fruit was grown. Joseph Vaccaro understood this. So did the future CEO of Chiquita, Sam Zemurray, who took over the entire nation of Honduras in 1910. These actions were just the beginning. Often with with the help of U.S. troops, banana companies intervened in Latin America more than twenty times between 1900 and 1960.
Concentrating the base of profit into a single-product industrial supply chain is dangerous. Anything that threatened to upset the equation and raise banana prices had to be crushed. In 1954, when Guatemalans elected a president who promised land reform, Chiquita – terrified that the movement would spread through Central America, engineered a CIA coup, ushering in three decades of instability that led to the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. The bananas kept growing.
Even nature – if it poses a threat – must come under massive attack. 1,000 varieties of banana grow worldwide, but the business model allows just a single breed to make up the thirty billion kilograms (sixty-six billion pounds) of fruit sold each year, creating a supply chain as primed for economy as the one that brings us hamburgers at McDonald’s. But this global plantation of identical twins means that when disease hits, it spreads far and fast, raising prices, wrecking the equation. The banana breed originally introduced to the world, called Gros Michel, was actually wiped out by such a disease. As farms were left useless by the blight, more and more land had to be taken. Finally, there was nowhere left to grow the fruit, and the industry replaced Gros Michel with today’s variety, called “Cavendish.” The changeover was so expensive that Chiquita, already weakened by the crisis, teetered on the verge of bankruptcy for years afterward (today, a new strain of the same disease is killing Cavendish – and a new banana land rush is underway in Africa. The industry claims the two are unrelated.)
In the 1970s, banana companies fought a root-destroying worm with a chemical called Nemagon. It was used throughout the world, but it was Dole’s actions in Nicaragua that were the basis of the 2007 case and Gertten’s film, which tells the story of workers who claimed to have been left sterile by Nemagon. The workers are brought to America by Juan Dominguez, a Los Angeles attorney known for winning awards for clients injured in car wrecks. The trial (and the film) ends with some workers receiving awards, and some not, but the verdict is strong enough for Dominguez to continue with a second suit. That suit was continuing this past April, just as Gertten was preparing his film – completed a few months earlier – for the festival debut.
Our banana: the Cavendish. Image from hobotraveler.com.
THE SELL-CHEAP STRATEGY IS AS FRAGILE AS EVER. The question is whether the industry is still willing to go to desperate lengths to preserve it. The answer – at least sometimes – appears to be yes. In 2007, Chiquita was fined $25 million by the U.S. justice department for making payments to Colombian paramilitaries. The company said the money was to protect workers, and not because the cost of land and labor are generally cheaper when regulated by force of arms. Dole is now under investigation for similar actions.
In 1992, a damaging report appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the daily newspaper of Chiquita’s headquarters city. Chiquita sued after it was revealed that the reporter who wrote the story had illegally hacked into its corporate voice mail system. The newspaper retracted the entire report, fired the journalist – who later pled guilty to theft – and paid the banana company $14 million, even though the facts of the story were not in dispute. For the next decade, the paper didn’t publish a single critical story about the banana company. But that wasn’t enough; Chiquita demanded – and received – control over the paper’s newsroom for well into the next decade, according to a report published in a journalism trade review.
When an individual challenges a banana company, humiliation has been part of the tactics. After Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown, he was paraded before the press in his underwear. He later committed suicide.
In the film, Dominguez reveals that his strategy is to start by winning a small suits and then build, and build. It wasn’t just Dole he wanted to take down. It was the whole banana industry. He considered the mixed verdict in the first case good enough to continue, but it all came to an end when Dole presented evidence, gathered in Nicaragua, that Dominguez’s team had coached witnesses. The U.S. judge dismissed the case with a statement that implied that everything known about banana companies, banana workers, and pesticides was now questionable: “We’ll never know,” she said, “if anybody…was was actually injured.”
That’s false. In Gertten’s film, you’ll see Dole’s CEO, under oath, admit that the company continued to use Nemagon after it knew the chemical was harmful. You’ll see the first jury apparently acting fairly, since it finds for some plaintiffs, and rules against others. You’ll see families and clinics and workers in Nicaragua. Not mentioned in the film is the fact that Dole paid over $20 million in prior Nemagon settlements, some dating as far back as 1992.
Above: BANANAS!* trailer. Below: Dole’s response.
Success in the Los Angeles Film Festival for “BANANAS!*” would have been a step beyond basic media coverage of a trial in progress. It could have meant distribution on U.S. television. It would have told the story of Nemagon to people in Dole’s home country. That Dole’s first attempts to stop BANANAS!* from showing came even before the company viewed the film saw isn’t a surprise. I’m encouraged that Gertten is now represented by a prominent free speech attorney in the U.S. I hope – and believe – he will win his case, but more importantly, I think it is important for Americans to see the film, and soon. In the meantime, they need to known that a banana company – of all things – doesn’t trust their judgement enough to watch an hour of footage it sees as unflattering and decide for themselves who and what is credible.
As far as the bigger case, there are several questions. The first is why the judge accepted the conclusions of Dole’s investigators, but rejected those of Dominguez’s. In Nicaragua, it is being argued that there was no difference between the kinds of people the teams were composed of, the types of interviews they conducted, or the evidence they presented. It is important to note that Dole ignored a decision against it delivered in a Nicaraguan court. In fact, starting with the 1992 verdicts, Dole’s Nemagon record in the courtroom has been spectacularly awful. This is a company that either did what it is being accused of, or has the worst lawyers a corporation has ever hired (this should encourage Gertten.)
Despite what Dole would like the public to believe, it received no absolution in the 2009 case. The company’s actions weren’t about Nemagon and Nicaraguan plantation workers. Instead, it focused on destroying Juan Dominguez, who is now fighting for his career. It had to prevent a cascade of losses across Latin America that might ultimately upset its business model as it forced banana prices to rise. This serves as a warning to anyone – including those currently suing Dole for alleged pesticide misuse in Ecuador, and even in the case of Colombian families attempting to hold Chiquita accountable for the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of the paid-off paramilitaries – that a challenge could result in huge personal losses. There’s no better evidence of how much Dole thought was at stake than the price it is attempting to get Dominguez (and Gertten) to pay.
Campaigning: Searches lead to Dole's paid point-of-view
Those stakes are real, but the habits of a century are also involved. In either case, there’s only one way to push the industry toward fairness and more humane policies. Bananas have to stop being cheap. The business model of the banana industry must be rejected by consumers. A new banana market needs to emerge, with multiple varieties of fruit, at varying price levels. It should begin with rejection of corporate bananas, and encouragement of Fair Trade growers to expand into alternate varieties. Adopted at the corporate level, this kind of strategy cold – ironically – insulate the banana companies from their one-banana-fits-all profit dependence. But that old reflex is primed for battle, not innovation. So far, though, the banana giants haven’t figured out how to sue shoppers, and our voices can’t be suppressed. There are too many supermarkets in the world. Even Big Banana can’t burn them all.
More info: “Dole: Behind the Smoke Screen” was published in 2006 by the advocacy group BananaLink and COLSIBA, an umbrella group for banana workers’ unions in Latin America. Here’s a link to an older document – “DBCP: The Legacy” that includes images of correspondence between Dole and the makers of Nemagon, Shell and Dow Chemical. For more on the banana business model, read my op-ed in the New York Times. There’s lots more info available, and a Google search now yields a bonus: Dole wants to be sure that have the chance to hear what it has to say, and is willing to pay to do it. Also: Not long after filing the suit, Dole announced its intention transform itself from what the world’s largest privately-held food supplier into a public one, with an initial public offering of stock planned, most likely, for 2010. It isn’t surprising that a company whose value was about to be determined in the open marketplace would strike hard against anyone or anything it saw as a threat to that value.
The Democracy Now radio program interviewed Nicholas Kozloff, who argued that there’s a Chiquita connection in the current Honduran political crisis, which saw President Manuel Zelaya deposed in either a coup or a constitutional emergency, or both, depending on which side you’re on, in June. The banana industry once made Honduras its largest exporting nation; that changed with Hurricane Mitch, in 1986, which devastated the crop, but there’s still a huge plantation network there. Here’s what Kozloff had to say:
“…there’s this revolving door of Washington insiders that are supporting companies like Chiquita banana. I just wrote an article about Chiquita, formerly known as the United Fruit Company. And, you know, throughout history, Chiquita banana has had enormous sway and power over Central American nations.
And we know that prior to the coup d’état in Honduras, Chiquita was very unhappy about President Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, because they said that this would cut into their profits and make it more expensive for them to export bananas and pineapple. And we know that they appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage provisions.
And we also—and what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte, who your previous guest mentioned in regards to the rampant human rights abuses that went on in Honduras throughout the 1980s. So I think that’s a really interesting connection.”
As I’ve pointed out earlier, assertions like this have fundamental credibility, because the banana industry’s business model absolutely mandates cheaply-produced product. Chiquita and Dole would collapse if they couldn’t sell this perishable fruit, transported from thousands of miles away, for less than any other fruit – even locally grown apples – in the supermarket. That’s why Dole sues filmmakers whose work might rally support for lawsuits brought by injured workers; and why the banana industry has been involved – time and again – in coups, bribery, payoffs, and general skullduggery (tons documented in my book and this site. Here’s a link to one of the more recent incidents.
The problem with Fair Trade bananas is that bananas are too cheap – there’s just not enough cash in the pipeline to make this strategy for bringing true “fairness” to the fruit effective (Fair Trade bananas cost, at most, just a few pennies more than conventional fruit; compare that to coffee and chocolate – two relative Fair Trade success stores – which garner huge premiums for their provenance.) Farmers in Dominica are finding that out, as this story, from Dominica News Online, reports, quoting Mitchell Roberts, of the country’s National Fair Trade Organisation.
“The costs of inputs escalated, the cost of packaging material escalated, labour has always been a high cost, and because of that farmers feel that they were not making money and their cost of production is high and the returns they get, was not reflective of the amount of effort they put, so some farmers definitely had to leave it,” Roberts stated. He said there are now three hundred and fifty active Fairtrade farmers selling bananas, a major decrease over the last year. “We started with close to six hundred farmers when we started last year, and now, we are down to three hundred and fifty,” he said.
There’s far more at stake in Fair Trade bananas than in any other food product. Nothing else comes close to the banana’s century of injustice – and nothing any Fair Trade banana marketed today comes close to reversing those injustices in a statistically significant manner. If the point of Fair Trade isn’t just to make consumers feel good, then those who currently advocate Fair Trade need to look at ways to sell bananas for more money. Hint: If you sell the same banana variety as Chiquita and Dole, you’re in bed with them. Starting in September, I’ll be publishing a series of articles explaining why; if you’re in Los Angeles, you can come see my talk at LACE, which will cover the same topic.
Writer/comedian Danforth France saw this Dole freighter unloading in San Diego while he was attending last week’s Comic-Con, and he sent me the linked tweet.
The ship is the Dole Honduras – one of two that constitute the banana giant’s Pacific fleet. The vessel makes over 20 annual north-south trips along a route that stretches from San Diego to Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala; Caldera, Costa Rica; Guayaquil, Ecuador; and Paita, Peru, according to Dole Ocean Cargo.
Danforth’s image was taken July 26, and the vessel’s current schedule indicates that it is handling shorter haul work right now. The Port of San Diego’s Marine Information System indicates that it has already made a full round trip since then, and is due back today. It will depart for Costa Rica on Tuesday, August 4,
The most interesting thing about the vessel is its color. Tradition has it that banana boats be painted white. Chiquita’s ships, starting even before the early 1900s,were known as the “Great White Fleet.” Though the Honduras is a bit of a shabby beige, it fits the traditional scheme, which is more than just custom. Bananas are highly perishable and grown far away. They have to be shipped under refrigeration if they’re to arrive at your supermarket ready-to-ripen, rather than icky brown. But despite these formidable built-in costs, bananas remain incredibly cheap. That seemingly impossible paradox can only be overcome if every cost-cutting measure is taken – so heat-reflecting paint jobs have been part the fruit’s business model almost since day one.
Thanks, Danforth!
Seen any interesting banana stuff lately? Tweet me….
Huggable, lovable – but not the kind of baby banana that I’m talking about.
Though the vast majority of bananas we buy – statistically, all – are of the endangered Cavendish variety, there’s a good chance you’ve seen something else, these days and if you’re a banana-type (or have become one), you might have wondered: what are those little bananas?
Both Chiquita and Dole offer versions of the half-sized fruit, with Chiquita selling them under the “Minis” brand, and Dole offering them as “Baby” bananas.
In the “big” banana world, there’s absolutely no difference between what Chiquita, Dole (or any other commercial banana importer) sells: everything is Cavendish. Action surrounds small-time fruit. For the first time in over a century, the two biggest banana companies are slugging it out for a market niche with different varieties.
The Chiquita “Mini” is a breed called Pisang Mas, originally from Malaysia, but now – like all bananas imported to the U.S. – grown in Latin America.
Dole actually sells three different varieties under the Baby band name – Orito, Lady Finger, and Manzano.
The fruit are tough to find, since they’re in various stages of test-marketing, as well as subject to seasonal variation. They also cost about three times as much as their ordinary counterparts. But they’re worth seeking out, and not just because they prove – possibly for the first time to the average American consumer – that there’s something beyond the generic banana. Though the four types share some characteristics (beyond size), they’re also quite different from each other.
I’ve put together a guide to the four varieties, but one caveat: no great banana arrives easily. Dole doesn’t distinguish between the three types it offers – they’re all labelled the same – so side-by-side taste tests are going to be tough. But persevere. The results will be worth it (and ignore the for-kids marketing that the banana giants have attached to the product. Sure, they are great after school, as Chiquita’s says. But this isn’t baby food.)
Oh, and one more thing, and you MUST do this, or else your adventure in little bananas will surely fail: LITTLE BANANAS TASTE HORRIBLE UNTIL THEY’RE RIPE – AND RIPE, FOR LITTLE BANANAS, IS NOT YELLOW! You need to let the fruit turn brown or else it will not be sweet or soft enough. This will go against every banana extinct you have been trained to adhere to. Trust me.
CHIQUITA’S PISANG MAS (BRAND NAME: MINI)
Super sweet – but only when very ripe. This is a fruit that is awesome when “peaking,” but the peak can be hard to catch. When not peaking, not so good.
Similar peaking/ripening characteristics as Pisang Mas.
Doesn’t easily turn brown when cut, making it perfect for fruit salads.
Susceptible to Panama Disease Race One, the malady that killed the first worldwide commercial banana crop – and which still exists today.
Closer to a mini-Cavendish in appearance. Slender(ish.) Super popular in Australia, so if you’ve got an Aussie in tow ask him or her for identification help.
DOLE BABY (TYPE III – MANZANO/APPLE):
The chubby Manzano, or “apple” banana. Photo: Thrifty Foods
Falls into the “apple” banana category – giving it a unique, tangy-sweet taste. Much less bland than our Cavendish, but some banana marketers have traditionally believed that consumers would reject such a different-flavored fruit.
Definitely the most “gourmet” banana of the bunch.
Small ripeness/sweetness issue. Can be eaten a little bit less brown if you like the tart flavor, but you must wait beyond brown – until the skin is black – for the highest sugar content (which will give you a fabulous, multi-dimensional bite.)
Difficult to grow in wet, lowland conditions
Easier to find than others – sold under many brand names (or none at all) in Latin markets, where it is often a Mexican import.
Identification tips: Significantly fatter, chunkier than Cavendish and probably the other little bananas, as well.
Once you’ve tried a couple, it’s worth thinking a bit about what this all means in a world where the single fruit that we generally eat is threatened with practical extinction. The arrival of these alternate bananas in our markets shows that variety is possible, and that the commercial banana companies are willing to experiment with it (even with the for-kids-only marketing tilt.)
Despite this, the banana companies are likely very hesitant to move the fruit into any testing beyond these niches. The reason is that – according to conventional industry wisdom – there’s simply too much “wrong” with the pint-sized fruit. The main arguments against mainstreaming mini-bananas include:
Ripening. All of these fruit must be quite dark to taste good. The banana companies are (rightly?) afraid that the typical consumer is so well conditioned toward seeing a golden banana as perfect that wider acceptance would simply never occur.
Production. The varieties in question can’t be grown as broadly, geographically speaking, as Cavendish. There probably isn’t enough land in Latin America to make any one of these varieties anything near to a market share winner.
Shipping: These are thin-skinned fruit. Today’s banana supply chain is so industrialized that the little fruit don’t fit into it, requiring costly “custom” handling all along the way. For an industry built on turning an exotic tropical fruit into a commodity as cheap and ubiquitous as a fast-food burger, the idea of reinventing itself to handle more complex products may feel both financially and culturally risky.
Marketing. People buy bananas by the bunch. Would the price/weight equation shift with a smaller banana as our main choice, or even as a more prominent alternate? The banana has been America’s favorite fruit – by far – since the 1920s. Changing the very size, shape, and price of that fruit into something completely new would be a terrifying prospect for the banana companies, which introduced the fruit to us, struggled to make it our favorite, and have fought – often spilling blood – to keep it exactly the same ever since.
Despite all this, change has to come.
All of these arguments are based on a single premise: that the banana we eat today will last forever. It won’t. It might not even last a decade.
The truth is that, as a living organism, all bananas have strengths, and all bananas have weaknesses. The biggest weakness the world’s banana crop has today, though, has nothing to do with the fruit itself: it has to do with the human folly of relying on a single variety to feed millions.
The half-sized varieties from Chiquita and Dole are not, I’m told, doing all that well at the market. Some of Dole’s farms in Ecuador that were devoted to the Orito fruit are reported to have closed. But the proof of concept – getting the fruit from there to here, figuring out how to market and sell it - has been accomplished, and despite my frequent criticism of the banana companies, there’s credit deserved for that.
The experiment, however, needs to be seen as more than just marketing. The biological common sense – and necessity – of breaking the Cavendish monoculture needs to be acknowledged, as well. It is in combining salesmanship with this common sense that will lead the industry away from the dead end it is now rapidly heading toward. The “Mini” and “Baby” fruit provide a blueprint – even, focused as it is on children, it appears to have been written in crayon.
This is a demonstrator project created by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa. I love the idea, because it really does capture what a banana skin is. The colors, shape, and texture are perfect.
Here’s Fukasawa’s design for a strawberry juice box:
Here’s a second version, with a similar design. This one is actually on the market in Japan, I’m told, which is why it is less clean: the package needed information on it.
Less clean, but still lovely compared to some of our stateside juice packaging horrors:
Interesting strategy at my favorite local convenience store, on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Rosemont In the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles (just steps from Dodger Stadium.)
Instead of the typical branded, presented-in-a-box fruit Chiquita is selling in many U.S. convenience stores, the fruit here is bought at local supermarkets and sold in an ordinary basket. At the current price – 69 cents per banana – the store manager told me customers purchased a respectable fifty or so a day. Still, he thought he could do better, and was about to add a twofer, with a pair of bananas going for a buck.
The DIY approach nets the local shop a considerable profit over Chiquita's all-in-one strategy, which involves a national distribution network of refrigerated product, each fruit with a sticker on it, to of about 13,000 convenience stores. Chiquita's suggested retail price for its product is 75 to 99 cents. The benefit, it says, is that that the controlled supplyand special packaging allows the fruit to arrive at the stores perfectly ripe – eliminating the need for store managers to spend time waiting for the green bananas typically found on supermarket shelves to ripen. The downside is profit margins: Chiquita charges C-stores about forty cents per fruit. My 7-Eleven manager can buy bananas at the Trader Joe's down the street for half that.
Analysis: though it is certainly more profitable for convenience stores to adopt the DIY approach, most local mini-marts probably won't do so – meaning that the Chiquita method will likely be more successful. Whatever else the company does wrong or right, this is a visionary and important (though as-yet unproven) strategy, because it demonstrates the banana's changing – and critical – role in the American diet: as the best, most affordable stand-in for the mountains of junk food that have created a massive juvenile health crisis.
THE BANANA BLOG is about the world's most endangered - and dangerous - fruit. THE BIG PARADE is about stairways, route and transit geekery, and pedestrian pursuits in Los Angeles. ASYMPTOTES is about writing and obsession. It is new, like an abandoned subdivision about to be invaded by zombies. You can also read all the topics at once.
