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

      Today, major banana companies like Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte and Fyffes use several different brands. Chiquita uses names such as “Amigo” and “Consul” in addition to the Chiquita brand. This is not so much related to quality, but rather to fruit size or specific markets.

      The development of the brand names themselves is also interesting. As mentioned above, the Dole of today was formerly known as “Standard Fruit”. Dole has used other brand names such as “Cabana” or “Cabanita” as brand names. Dole’s banana business dates back to the 19th century, when the “Standard Fruit & Steamship Company” of the Vaccaro brothers operated out of New Orleans, Louisiana and imported bananas mainly from Honduras. This company used brands such as “Cabana” and “Tropipac”, although the — then new — “Cabana” label was reserved for the disease-resistant Cavendish bananas in the early 1960s. Tropipac, on the other hand, continued to be used as a brand name in the 1960s in response to the declining deliveries of Gros Michel bananas. These Great Michel bananas tasted much better, but were not resistant to Panama disease.

      After the Gros Michel bananas were no longer used, the Tropipac label became a second brand. When Castle & Cooke from Hawaii, then owners of the pineapple empire Dole, bought Standard Fruit in the 1970s, they decided to use the name Dole instead. The brand name Cabana became a secondary label, while Tropipac was deactivated. Today, “Bobby Banana” is another famous Dole label.

      And while companies fought over the unique colours and shapes of the labels in the 1960s, banana labels became political in the 1980s. Some smaller labels were controversial, like the Russian bear Mischa. This label was never applied to a banana when the USA decided not to participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

      In Europe there are many labels for bananas from Caribbean and African countries (the so-called “ABC countries”), which had protection quotas against “dollar bananas” until 2006, when the EU banana quota system was abandoned and replaced by a tariff-only system. This “banana war” was part of a trade war that led the World Trade Organisation to support global “free trade”. As a result, however, some ABC brands have since disappeared.

      As a result of the banana war, most of the banana stickers and labels used also began to indicate the country of origin of the bananas — so instead of using a single label that only contained the name of the banana company, each production department suddenly started using unique labels that indicated the origin of the fruit — be it the country name or an additional letter to indicate the different production departments within a country.

      A more recent development in banana labelling is the so-called “fair trade” bananas with brand names such as Max Havelaar, Fairnando and Transfair, which represent European efforts to promote solidarity with smaller independent producers in many tropical countries.

      The most famous banana label is still Chiquita. The label has been fairly consistent since the 1960s and, due to the massive PR campaign that has now been running for 70 consecutive years, most people immediately associate bananas with this brand name, although there are also older brands such as Fyffes.

      The story of this descendant of the former United Fruit Company (“UFCO”) is fascinating. Historically, the UFCO had a somewhat split personality. The UFCO was responsible for the development of large parts of Latin America: it built railways, model cities, established a general health system, set up schools and research centres and employed thousands and thousands of people. On the other hand, there were political controversies and the company was approaching a monopoly in the US market. Antitrust laws forced the company to split up.

      Today, many of the big banana companies are no longer the all-powerful corporations that once dominated entire countries. Nevertheless, the actions of the past sometimes affect today’s business. When Chiquita celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1999, a number of special commemorative labels were issued to mark the occasion. They were used to mark fruit that was sold throughout Europe but never made it to the U.S. market, an obvious management reaction at the time due to bad publicity following a series of articles in a Cincinnati newspaper.

      Today, banana companies use banana labels to promote school lunches or anniversaries and to sponsor major sporting events such as the Olympics or World Championships. However, the EU/WTO controversy mentioned above also led to one of the strangest banana stickers: a French-language protest sticker was illegally affixed to Chiquita bananas by local activists in Belgium.

      And what began with the labelling of bananas has developed into something much bigger. Nowadays, many different kinds of fruit and vegetables are branded and consequently labelled. No doubt you have seen labelled oranges, apples and pears from almost every country in the world. As a result, the entire fruit labelling industry has developed into an industry in its own right. Although it may seem like a nuisance, stickers are not just a simple PR tool to promote a brand name nowadays.

      Today’s stickers or labels have more of a function than just scanning the price at the checkout. The PLU code or Price Look Up number printed on the sticker tells you how the fruit was grown. Reading the PLU code indicates whether the fruit was genetically modified, organically grown or produced with chemical fertilizers, fungicides or herbicides. Basically the PLU code can be divided into three different groups:

      1. If the PLU code contains only four digits, the product has been grown conventionally or “traditionally” using chemicals. These four letters indicate the type of vegetable or fruit; for example, all bananas are marked with the code 4011;

      2. If the PLU code contains five digits and the number begins with “8” the fruit or vegetable is genetically modified. A genetically modified or GMO banana would have code 84011;

      3. If the PLU code contains five digits and the number begins with a “9”, it means that the product has been organically grown and cannot be genetically modified. An organic banana would be labelled with the number 94011.

      By the way, the glue used to attach the stickers is considered food-safe, but the stickers themselves are not necessarily edible. Here are six interesting facts:

      1. Fruit stickers are mostly edible nowadays, they are made of “edible paper” or other food-safe materials, so eating one or two stickers will not harm you. Nevertheless it is better to simply peel them off!

      2. The sticker is food safe, at least that is what the FDA tells people in the USA.

      3. PLU codes are the same everywhere!

      4. Do you find it difficult to remove fruit labels? Stick some tape on it to remove them. They say it works...at least on apples!

      5. Laser-applied “fruit tattoos” could make stickers obsolete in the future.

      6. You can turn fruit stickers into art, provided you haven’t eaten them. Or start collecting them. In fact, collecting banana stickers is something bigger than many people might think. Soon after banana stickers became widespread, people started to actually collect them. The oldest known collectors started somewhere in the 1970s. This meant — like collecting stamps — keeping the collected stickers in books. With the beginning of the worldwide use of the Internet, collecting banana stickers took on a whole new dimension. The first banana label collections went online as early as 1996, even though only a few pure banana label websites were active at that time.

      Collecting banana labels seems to be very popular in the U.S., Germany, Costa Rica and Ecuador, and “Der Spiegel”, a weekly German news magazine, already had a documentation series on the Internet in 1996. The fourth and last part showed a screenshot of a banana label website.

      In 2001 several collectors decided to organize the “1st Meeting of Banana Collectors”, which took place in Munich and attracted 19 participants from all over the world. In 2002, the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem had a five-month exhibition entitled “...banana stickers of all things”, in which some 2500 labels were shown.

      During the Fruit Logistica 2006 in Berlin, several banana sticker collectors also met, followed by the “4th Banana Sticker Collectors’ Meeting”, which took place again in Munich during 2006.

      Some of the well-known names in the