Die deutsche Kühlschifffahrt - German Reefer Shipping. Karsten Kunibert Krüger-Kopiske

das „1. Treffen der Bananensammler“ zu organisieren, das in München stattfand und 19 Teilnehmer aus der ganzen Welt anlockte. Im Jahr 2002 hatte das Botanische Museum Berlin-Dahlem eine fünfmonatige Ausstellung mit dem Titel „... ausgerechnet Bananenaufkleber“, in der rund 2500 Etiketten gezeigt wurden.

      Während der Fruit Logistica 2006 in Berlin trafen sich auch mehrere Bananenaufkleber-Sammler, gefolgt vom „4. Bananenaufkleber-Sammlertreffen“, das im Laufe des Jahres 2006 wieder in München stattfand.

      Einige der bekannten Namen in der Szene der Bananensammler haben Websites ausgearbeitet, auf denen alle Etiketten ausgestellt sind. Becky Martz hat zum Zeitpunkt der Abfassung dieses Buches 14.491 verschiedene Etiketten in ihrer Sammlung, während Elvis Velez aus Guayaquil etwa 16.000 in seiner Sammlung zählt.

      Einige der Topsammler haben ihren Sitz in Costa Rica: Walter Ugalde aus Cariari (Limón) zählt über 18.000 verschiedene Etiketten, während Pablo Barquero Lopez aus Guapiles (der 1977 mit dem Sammeln begann) inzwischen über 20.000 Etiketten zählt. Pablo war es auch, der 2008 die „Bananensammlerkonferenz für Bananenetiketten“, bekannt als „TicoBan 2008“, leitete, die Sammler aus der ganzen Welt nach Costa Rica lockte.

      Bananenetiketten faszinieren die Menschen nach wie vor. Es wird noch etwa 15 Jahre dauern, bis Fyffes‘ „Blue Label“ 100 Jahre alt wird, aber zweifellos wird es in den kommenden Jahren viele verschiedene Gründe für größere oder kleinere Serien von Gedenk- oder Sonderetiketten geben, wie wir sie im letzten halben Jahrhundert gesehen haben.

      Banana labels

      The labelling of fruit began sometime in the 1920s. As far as can be investigated, it was bananas that were first labelled with a brand name. The oldest written evidence of the creation of a brand name for bananas comes from Fyffes.

      Elders & Fyffes Ltd, a predecessor of today’s Fyffes plc, was a division of United Fruits (now known as Chiquita) for part of the 20th century. However, Elders & Fyffes continued to have its own distribution, sales and marketing channels.

      In the late 1920’s, bananas were transported by ship and processed only at the port of unloading, where hands were cut off the perennials after ripening. It was difficult to identify Fyffes bananas in the shops because the only reference to the name was the wooden crates (known as “flats”) in which the fruit was distributed to retailers, but the fruit was never displayed in these crates in the shops.

      The need to identify the bananas supplied by Fyffes to retailers became really urgent when the Jamaica Producer’s Association started operating with its own shipping company on 12 April 1929. It was the first time that Fyffes faced serious competition in the United Kingdom. As with most inventions, the solution was quite simple: brand the fruit to make it more easily recognisable to the buyer. Although it sounds so simple, the beginning was difficult: the idea was that the sales representatives (and not the subsidiaries) had to spend their money and manpower to put the company logos on the banana fingers. The glue was far from perfect, and applying water-soluble gummed paper labels to the bananas was complicated and quite challenging.

      In July 1929, Fyffes CEO Henry Stockley, in support of a national brand announcement, took a hard line to force implementation on all “ripeners” and began marking the fruit. The label was called “The Blue Label” — it was basically a simple oval blue label with the brand name “Fyffes”. Over the next few months the labelling process was introduced in the UK and Ireland. By mid 1930, it appeared that someone among the dealers had invented a machine that could attach the labels to the “fingers” in order to save costs, known as “Tray Labelling Device Type-B”.

      Shortly after the labelling of fruit became commonplace, the programme was introduced on the European continent and spread like wildfire. Sometime after January 1930, the use of the label was also introduced in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and France. From 1931 the name was also used in Bucharest (Romania) or Switzerland. Lorries, railway wagons, tram cars, airplanes — applying the banana label as an advertising medium to everything that moves or stands proved to be a great success.

      Although there has been some speculation that bananas from the former German Cameroon (Cameroon) may have carried some kind of label even before World War I, this information seems to be incorrect, as the first German labels probably date from the 1930s (long after Germany lost its colonies in Africa), and the idea of labelling may have been copied by Fyffes.

      These first German bananas were marketed by the Afrikanische Frucht Compagnie from Hamburg as “Deutsche Kamerun Bananen”. The German shipping company F. Laeisz operated a steamship service to Cameroon, which was then a German colony, at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1911 F. Laeisz had imported around 350 banana plants from Central America and the Canary Islands to Cameroon and founded a banana company under the name “Afrikanische Frucht-Compagnie GmbH” (today still AFC).

      In the meantime, fruit labelling had not become as widespread in the USA as in Europe. In the 1930s, the United Fruit Company made experiments with a brand known as “Meloripe”. However, little is known about this brand name and whether or not “Meloripe” labels were actually attached to the bananas.

      In 1944, however, at the height of the Second World War, United Fruit introduced “Miss Chiquita”, personalized for marketing purposes by the singer and actress Carmen Miranda. This was the first serious attempt in the USA to sell a banana as a brand nationwide. The “Chiquita” brand name was introduced through radio jingles, advertisements in newspapers and of course in the cinema.

      In the early years of labeling, United Fruit experimented with how to put the name and the Miss Chiquita logo on the bananas. Originally, a paper band was wrapped around the hands (of five fingers) of ripe bananas.

      Similar to Fyffes, the Chiquita label had the same blue colour and the same oval shape and type of letters. The ribbons were wrapped around the ripe fruit in the USA. This all changed dramatically after the entire banana industry underwent massive changes in the early 1960s due to the widespread “Panama disease” in tropical production departments.

      Panama Disease destroyed the Gros Michel variety, which was the only banana variety used worldwide. The new variety Cavendish, on the other hand, was resistant to Panama Disease, but damaged very quickly during handling. Instead of shipping whole bundles to the ports of destination and labelling the fruit after ripening, the bananas were now unloaded on the plantations and packed in cartons.

      The box invented at that time by United Fruit, which is still known today as the UF21A box, also meant that the fruit had to be labelled on the plantation. The idea of using stickers was born in 1963, but because the machines used to apply the paper labels were too rough and could crush the fruit, the new stickers were applied to the fruit by hand.

      Banana stickers now came in large rolls, and the stickers were applied to the green fruits at the end of the packaging line, just before the hands were packed into boxes. Soon other banana companies began to use stickers to identify their bananas.

      This led to several lawsuits in late 1967 and early 1968 in which United Fruit Company sued Standard Fruit and Steamship Company (now known as Dole) in the Massachusetts District Court. United Fruit claimed that the labels used by Standard were too similar to its own labels. This case was one in a long series of lawsuits in the Eastern District Court of Louisiana.

      The court ruled that the Standard label, although it appeared to be similar in shape and colour to the United label, did not infringe any trademark rights. The label in question was Standard’s brand name “Tropipac”. Standard, in turn, was forced to bring two counterclaims against United, alleging that United had attempted to monopolise the colour combinations suitable for banana labels by using different labels. It was even claimed that United had adopted a labelling programme copied from Standard and was trying to deceive “banana buyers” by making them believe that every banana with a label was produced by United.

      The battle over colour codes and registered trademarks was in full swing, and soon after that, several banana companies registered their logos and brand names in Europe as well — in Germany, for