What has gone wrong with supermarket bananas ?

Enterprise_1701C

My supermarket bananas last a week, but they are in a fruit bowl on their own. The bananas from the local market are very poor, and it is rather hit-and-miss as to whether Lidl has any in, and we do not have a local greengrocer. We have an asian supermarket up the road, but I have heard less than good things about their hygiene! Some people do not have a real choice!

moonrakerz

The reason why most bananas are so awful is because of "cost cutting" to give the customer the cheapest possible price.

Years back the banana importers (Geest, Fyffes) would offload the bananas from the refrigerated ship and send them to special warehouses where the bananas would be allowed to warm up and start the ripening process. They would then be shipped to the shops as they started to turn yellow and NOT refrigerated.

Now they are kept refrigerated all the time and no effort is made to ripen them "properly" - it is now up to some spotty youth in Tesco's back room to decide when to put them on the shelf - green and wet ! A lot of the time they go from green to black without passing through yellow.........................:(

If you want cheap bananas that's the price you have to pay nowadays !

(The housing estate down the hill from me is on the site of an "old banana factory" - the electricity sub-station still says "Geest" on it)

Triggles

We've found you have to look around a bit in different places until you find somewhere with consistently good bananas, as silly as that sounds. Our 2 boys love bananas, so we go through a couple every day. We generally buy them at Sainsburys, as our local market and Tesco bananas always seem to turn black after about 2 days and are generally not very nice looking.

sock-knitter

i hate wet green bananas on the supermarket shelves, agree with others about aldi ones, we have no greengrocer here

Stompa

sock-knitter wrote: »

...agree with others about aldi ones

Me too. We must get through about 1000 bananas a year, they always keep fine, and we never end up having to throw any away.