New banana shelving at British markets. Photo: Guardian.
Tesco, the British supermarket chain, is unveiling what is the first real change in the way bananas are sold and displayed in stores since the variety of fruit we eat today – called Cavendish – arrived in the 1960s to replace its disease-destroyed predecessor. (Our Cavendish is a fragile, and had to be bagged and boxed; the older fruit, Gros Michel, was tough, and was simply sent to stores in giant bunches.) Tesco’s “hammocks,” pictured above, cradle the fruit, preventing it from bruising.
Though the primary motivator seems to be preventing waste – tons of roughed-up Cavendish are discarded each year – a second advantage, a Tesco produce manager told the Guardian newspaper, is that the shelving allows the chain to fine-tune ripeness, offering fruit at “all stages” between yellow and green.
What’s most interesting isn’t what this means for the banana industry now, but for the future. With the Cavendish breed under attack by a deadly and incurable fungus, new breeds are eventually going to arrive at our stores. From what we know, they are likely to be varieties even more fragile than the fruit we eat today. While this is primarily a problem at the growing and shipping end of the banana supply chain, developing ways to present and maintain delicate fruit to consumers is also key. Tesco seems to have made a huge leap in solving that problem.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
