FOOD PARTNER SPECIAL: The science secrets behind the humble banana with Fyffes
Ever wondered why a banana curves? As part of National Nutrition Month, we invited the team at Fyffes to come and get geeky with us about tropical fruit.
Fyffes is Europe’s largest banana and pineapple importer and we’re proud to call them a longstanding food partner! We’ve been working closely with their Coventry team since 2022 and in the past 12 months, they’ve given over 170 tonnes of tropical fruit to our families, which is the equivalent of 406,000 meals!
Fyffes has been bringing tropical fruits to the UK for over a century. Founded in 1888, Fyffes handles millions of bananas daily, along with pineapples and melons, managing the complex logistics of delivering these fruits from plantations to tables across Europe. We had the opportunity to grill Fyffes Produce Manager, Shania and Assistant Ops Manager, Sophie on the secret science of getting tropical fruit to the right place at the right ripeness.
Shania explains, “We do over 75 different SKUs for banana, if you can believe that. It's a lot more complicated than what you would think To get the banana to the right specification that a customer wants. It's a lot of work to land on the correct day. What you see on the shelves in the shops, is very different to what we see here at the depot. We see colour three to four.” If you’re wondering what those colours relate to, Fyffes bananas live and die by the colour chat show below:
Fyffes banana colour chart
The journey from farm to fork is no easy feat: bananas take nine months to mature before they can be harvested, while pineapples require an impressive 13 months to grow in Costa Rica. They are extremely sensitive to shifts in climate. Sales of bananas, for instance, tend to drop when temperatures fall below 10°C, while summer heat exceeding 22°C leads to a preference for water-rich fruits like melons. As a result, surplus produce, which remains perfectly edible but fails to meet retail specifications, is often left over. All the more for us!
Instead of allowing this surplus to go to waste, Fyffes has taken steps to repurpose the excess fruit by partnering with us. But they had some weird and wonderful other ways to use old bananas…
“You can polish silverware by blending the peel into a paste and then, if you apply it to your silver items, apparently when you wipe it off after a few minutes, it's nice and shiny. Got any silver laying around and you can reuse your banana!” Sophie laughs.
Ever wondered why some bananas curve more than others? Bananas, for example, are technically classified as berries, and their signature curve is the result of temperature stress and the effects of negative gravity. “The pregnant plant produces the bunch internally and if you cut the plant down the middle, you can actually see the bunch starting to form. So, as it grows it moves up the plant and it's then pushed out of the top and drops and the bunch is facing the earth. The fingers then start to move upwards. The misconception is that the fingers grow towards the sun, but it's to do with negative gravity and that's just the way that the bananas grow. The question is then, why some bananas more curve than the others? This is because the night temperatures are cooler than 22 degrees. The mother plant feels stress, so the bananas have a larger curve.” Who knew!?
Pineapples, on the other hand, do not grow sweeter as they ripen; instead, their sweetness is determined at harvest based on “Brix levels.” Another ‘Did-you-know’ moment was Victorians once used pineapples as deodorants and even rented them out as status symbols at dinner parties long before they became a supermarket staple.
The long journey these fruits take just emphasise the importance of minimising food waste, and thanks to Fyffes’ generosity, their surplus fruit is given a second life, supporting our communities whilst helping to reduce food waste.
Listen to our podcast partner special right here…
