Bananas Page 7
By the 1970s fruit companies had largely abandoned freight trains in favor of refrigerated tractor-trailer trucks to transport bananas to every hamlet and corner store in America.
4
SELLING
BananaS
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the increasing sophistication of capitalism focused the mass market and the belief that demand would expand to meet supply. The idea of pricing bananas low enough so that everyone could buy them and still make a profit for the producing company preceded Henry Ford’s Model T. The major banana-importing companies set up marketing divisions and educational programs to convince Americans that the banana was an essential item to be eaten every day. Not only did bananas taste good; they were good for you. If consumers could be convinced to include bananas in every meal as well as in between-meal snacks, the market would be limited only by the quantity of fruit that could be grown.
The small import companies of the nineteenth century proved that there was a market for bananas in the United States if the fruit were offered at prices that could compete with local apples, peaches, pears, and oranges.1 Bananas lost their elite luxury status and disappeared from the dinner tables of the wealthy, transformed through low price, year-round availability, and abundance into comfort food for children and the elderly. Today bananas seldom appear on elegant menus because they are considered plebeian. The fruit that began its career in the Americas as a food for slaves became in the nineteenth century an exotic luxury for wealthy and well-traveled North Americans, then entered the twentieth century as the poor man’s food. A new cycle began when the banana was incorporated into the diets of the middle and upper classes where it was deemed important for good health.
What turned an exotic, foreign, and costly fruit into the daily fare of even the poorest American? Did Americans begin to eat bananas simply because they liked them, or were there other reasons for the enormous popularity of the imported fruit? Low cost was certainly a factor. Increasing availability throughout the year was another. Ease of preparation was a third. In addition, a new food has to be thought of as tasting good before a person will try it. Advertising and other promotional activities kept the banana fresh in the minds, if not in the mouths, of most residents of the United States.
In the tropics banana plantations can be managed so that fruit is continually coming to harvest year-round. This is an advantage that is harder to grasp today when we expect to find a wide variety of fruit at the grocery store; apples, kiwi fruit, grapes, even strawberries and raspberries are available to us year-round albeit at a higher price. Another advantage that bananas had was that they were always the same despite the season. Americans do not like surprises with their food and value consistency, as Howard Johnson and later McDonald’s and other chain restaurants have made abundantly clear.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, fresh fruits and vegetables were eaten when they were harvested, and only fruit preserved by drying or canning was available during the winter and spring months. In the 1890s steamship and railroad networks were able to bring fresh semitropical and tropical fruit and vegetables to households throughout the United States, enriching American diets with much needed vitamins and varying the menu. Bananas were incorporated in the diet in place of other seasonal fruit, interchangeable, cheaper, and consistently available.
At first, bananas were sold in East Coast ports from the ships they arrived on to anyone who would carry them away. The fruit was sold by the stem, each with as many as a hundred fingers or twenty hands. Wholesale buyers were able to select their own fruit as they only bought a few stems at a time.
As the demand for bananas grew stronger, the fruit began to be sold by the “steamer run,” as it came out of the ship.2 An 1894 article in Harper’s Weekly noted that it took a crowd of stevedores, twenty wagons, six to eight selectors, and an auctioneer to dispose of a cargo. The scene was described as follows:
The dock is usually filled with buyers and their trucks, and in a few hours the steamer’s hold is empty. A cargo of 32,000 bunches, one of the largest that ever arrived here, was disposed of last week in ten hours. The auctioneer stands on the steamer’s bridge, and the buyers crowd close to him. A sort of endless chain runs from the hold to the pier. Bunch after bunch is laid in the chain—an arrangement that has been in operation for only about three months—and as each bunch is lifted out an expert, who is known as a “selector,” and who is as skillful in his trade as a tea-taster is in his, runs his eye over it and pronounces it in quality a first, second, third, or “dock,” and then it is quickly loaded, according to grade in a waiting wagon.3
A stem with seven hands or more was considered a first, of six hands a second, and of five a third.4 The “docks” were ripe or soft fruit, unsuitable for sale by the commission merchants. They were sold to street peddlers “who swarm about with their carts, and are looking for bargains.”5
It took some capital and many experiments to learn the best method of handling bananas as they made their journey from the plantation to the ship, from the ship to the railroad to the warehouse, and ultimately to the retail store. Cut and shipped green, the fruit had to be allowed to ripen slowly so that it reached the consumer in salable form. Bananas that were either too green or too brown were unappealing to customers; the optimal stage of ripening was a clear, bright yellow. Wholesale dealers in New York City in the 1890s had to hold bananas for four or five days to ripen before sale in the city. Those that were to be sent any distance were kept green as long as possible by keeping them cool.6
Prior to the development of an organized distribution system, inland grocers who ordered bananas from importing companies did so at their own risk.7 The fruit changed hands many times between the plantation and the retail store, and extremes of temperature or rough handling could easily damage the fruit along the way. Even perfectly ripening fruit had to be distributed promptly to shopkeepers to allow sufficient time for it to be sold to the customer. In response to these problems, United Fruit organized the Fruit Dispatch Company in 1898 to handle the distribution and sale of their bananas and other tropical imports.8
Banana distribution companies searched for ways to control the speed of ripening of the fruit to ensure that it reached the customer in good condition. Refrigerated or heated steamship holds, railroad cars, and warehouses were designed especially for bananas. With the ripening process reasonably under control, retail stores could be kept supplied with salable fruit at all times. An article in the 1905 U.S. Department of Agriculture Year Book noted that:
there has been a gradual evolution of special transportation facilities from the box car, the pony refrigerators, and the slow express or boat service, with their irregular schedules, of forty years ago. The fast fruit-train service, the fruit-express car, the refrigerator car lines, the special fruit boats, the refrigerator compartments on shipboard, and the development of cold-storage warehouses as a link in the chain of distribution have brought together the producer and the consumer in the most distant parts of the United States and Canada.9
As distribution networks were established, fruit-import companies relied less upon direct dockside sales and more upon distribution centers in the interior cities. The Fruit Dispatch Company initially set up distributing divisions in twenty-one northern cities, including Buffalo, Chicago, Denver, Saint Louis, Montreal, and Pittsburgh.10 By 1923 there were forty-nine branches and over four hundred employees.11 Twelve years later the company had expanded to include fifty-two branch offices that sold bananas by the carload to jobbers.12 Orders were telegraphed or telephoned to offices at the ports of entry before the cargo was discharged, making loading and distribution more efficient.
Once the bananas reached major metropolitan centers by ship and railroad freight car, they were stored in special ripening warehouses with separate rooms kept at the different temperatures that would either hasten or retard the ripening process, according to orders received from retail stores.13 The Fruit Disp
atch Company provided plans for these warehouses and technical advice for their construction.
In the 1930s ethylene gas was introduced to produce uniformity in ripening and to speed up slow ripening fruit. The gas intensified the coloration of the peel and accelerated the ripening of the pulp. Although the gas was an anaesthetic, the Fruit Dispatch Company assured warehouse workers that “in the very dilute amounts used for ripening” it “does no harm to workmen.”14 This information was based on 110 ripening tests performed by the United Fruit Company Research Department in respiration chambers. An additional 134 ripening tests were carried out in small ripening rooms, and larger rooms were used to prove results on a commercial scale.
In the 1990s the major grocery store chains have their own warehouses with ripening rooms. Safeway, a grocery store chain in Maryland and the District of Columbia, has six huge storage facilities at their distribution center in Upper Marlborough, Maryland, housing 2,000 cardboard cases of bananas per room, 100 banana fingers to the box. Another large chain, Giant, has thirty rooms at a warehouse in Lanham, Maryland. Each room accommodates about 900 cases of bananas, and holds bananas at a different stage of the ripening process. The pressurized rooms use humidity, temperature, and a small dose of ethylene gas that mimic conditions in the tropics to control the ripening time. The bananas are tested periodically until they are ready to be trucked to the supermarkets.15
Field servicers were sent out to help banana jobbers with various problems in an attempt to avoid losses due to bruising and premature ripening. As the distribution system narrowed from shipload to boxcar load to individual order, the banana jobbers were responsible for breaking down the shipments to single stems of fruit for delivery to individual grocery stores. Special crates of various sizes and design were devised for this purpose. Returnable crates were constructed of oak slats with a burlap bag suspended inside and tied so that the stem with its hands of bananas could not be bruised. Nonreturnable crates made of lighter slats held a paper bag in which the fruit was packed in hay or straw. Another packing device was a cylindrical cardboard drum strengthened with wooden bottoms and hoops.16 In the 1930s wholesalers experimented with cutting ripe hands of bananas off the stem and packing them in wooden boxes for distribution. These boxes nested together, making them easier to return, as they did not take up much space.17
Banana crate, Story of the Banana, Education Department (Boston: United Fruit, 1925), 40.
Care and Display of Bananas, Fruit Dispatch Company Dealer Service Department (1955).
Dealer servicemen gave advice on retail merchandising of bananas in the stores. They prepared window displays and provided advertising copy and other tips on marketing the fruit to the consumer.18 Grocers were encouraged to display bananas on the stalk in their store windows or other areas where they would be readily seen. This was not always a successful sales ploy as shown in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street, in which he described a grocery store display window with “black overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping.” In the winter the fruit had to be protected from drafts of cold air and the bunches covered with paper bags or other wrappings at night in case the temperature in the store got too low.19 The stalk with the bunches of bananas still on it was suspended upside down and the grocer cut off the hands of fruit for customers with a special banana knife to avoid tearing the skin and exposing the pulp. The knife looked something like a linoleum cutter with a wooden handle and curved blade with the cutting edge on the inside curve.20
As self-service grocery stores and supermarkets proliferated in the mid-twentieth century, the hands were cut from the stalk in advance and set out on tables or counters for customers to select for themselves. Left to their own devices, customers were apt to break apart the hands of bananas to purchase two or three at a time. This left unappealing clusters or single fingers of fruit, often with the skin split open and unsalable. The loose bananas and damaged fruit was either marked down in price or discarded.
The Fruit Dispatch Company experimented to see whether it was possible to persuade the customer to purchase the entire hand, and therefore, it was hoped, to consume more bananas. Some grocers bound six or eight individual fingers with gummed tape to simulate a bunch to be sold at full price.21 One merchandising study that banded the fruit with paper tape on which was marked the weight and price found that large hands did not sell as well as smaller quantities.22
In the mid-1960s, hands of bananas were wrapped in a sleeve of heat-shrinkable film at a central warehouse. The wrap protected the hands from bruising, prevented the customer from removing individual fruit, and provided a surface for the label. This method had a “potential savings of 43 cents per forty-pound box when compared with the typical method of tape banding bananas at the retail store.”23 It worked well for the retailer but in many places customers rebelled, preferring to choose their own fresh fruit rather than purchase them packaged. Most supermarkets in the 1990s have returned to displays of unpackaged hands of bananas, and food stores, such as the Safeway chain in the Washington, D.C., area provide special little paper bags with handles for marked-down single fingers or overripe fruit. The white bag is printed with a picture of a yellow banana with the peel pulled down halfway. Over it is printed “Ripe Bananas—Ready for Eating and Cooking,” and a recipe for banana bread, one use for overripe bananas.
In the 1930s United Fruit briefly experimented with shipping hands of bananas in wooden boxes rather than on the stalk, but the experiment failed owing to the high cost of boxing.24 The first boxes used in the experiment were efficient to transport but held the heat generated by ripening bananas, causing problems with uneven and premature ripening in transit. Their use was abandoned until the 1950s.
A 1955 marketing research report released by the Agricultural Marketing Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted that the banana was still “one of the few perishable products handled without packaging between the point of production and the wholesale outlet.” According to the report, distributors were becoming increasingly interested in improved methods for receiving, ripening, and packing bananas for retail trade in order to cut losses from bruising and deterioration.25 Fruit companies again experimented with boxing hands of bananas at the plantation or the exporting port, rather than transporting the fruit on the stalk and packaging it at the port of arrival. The usual practice was to leave rejected bananas that had either come loose from the stem or were deemed too small or too large for the United States and Canadian markets. Innovations in cardboard boxing and the establishment of processing factories in the banana-growing regions cut down on the enormous waste of fruit.
Chiquita Brands International found a market niche for the individual bananas that become detached from the hand during harvesting. An advertisement to the restaurant trade in 1991 offered “Chef Singles—10 pounds of individual Chiquita bananas prepacked in the tropics in sturdy, easy-to-use boxes.”26 Dole also advertised ten-pound boxes of single bananas, assuring food service managers that “you can serve your customers fresh bananas at the peak of ripeness any day of the week, any meal of the day” without having to bother with breaking up the fruit into individual servings.27
The creation of a sturdy cardboard box with air holes and built-in handles is attributed to B. C. D’Antoni, an engineer with the Standard Fruit Company.28 Cardboard boxes eliminated many steps in processing, handling, and shipping since the fruit remained in the container from the plantation to the retail store, reducing labor as well as bruising. Standard Fruit built three box factories in Honduras and one in Costa Rica.29 The rest of the banana industry soon converted to shipping fruit in cartons.30 In 1962 the U.S. Department of Commerce changed its reports from the number of stems of bananas imported to hundred-weight of fruit.31 As boxing became the standard method of transporting bananas, hanging stems displaying hands of fruit disappeared from grocery store windows, although for a while vertical cardboard displays of individual hands continued to mimic the familiar banana stalk.
<
br /> The cardboard banana boxes also have a re-use value. The Capital Area Community Food Bank in Washington, D.C., for example, uses them to store and transport surplus food collected from grocery stores and other businesses. Available food is even measured in terms of numbers of banana boxes.
In addition to improvements in transportation, handling, and storage of bananas, advertising has had a great deal to do with modern food choices. Advertising is used to convince the consumer to purchase surpluses at the highest possible price. Americans are faced with a wide range of products when they go food shopping; advertising develops brand loyalty and may help people decide what to buy. Bananas were introduced into the United States at the same time as the development of the popular press, widespread literacy, and the appearance of women’s magazines and a multitude of cookbooks. At the turn of the century, an expanding middle class used food as a means of defining itself by imitating the preferences of the rich and rejecting the hallmarks of the poor such as pork, brown bread, thick soups, and dried fruit pies.32 Women no longer learned to cook from their mothers and grandmothers as new nutritional standards incorporating vitamins and calories rejected and disparaged older ways. Young women turned to authorities outside the home, such as the dietitians and scientists represented in advertising, to learn new ways of preparing and serving food for their families.
Bananas were the perfect new food for the rising middle class. Advertising before 1923 featured the banana “not only as a luxurious fruit but as a pure, nutritious food, suitable alike for the rich and the poor.”33 The fruit companies were ready with plenty of scientific advice and recipes to stimulate sales. The Fruit Dispatch Company was responsible for national advertising and promotional efforts of United Fruit as well as the logistics of banana transportation.