Bananas are alive.
They breathe long after they are picked, taking in oxygen, expiring carbon dioxide.
As they ripen, bananas radiate warmth.
“The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment,” a banana importer tells Nicola Twilley in “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, our Planet and Ourselves,” one of those relentlessly fascinating books that takes readers on a guided tour of something we’re known about all our lives yet never thought to be curious about.
From colonial entrepreneurs sawing up ice on ponds and shipping it to Australia insulated in sawdust, to Chicago’s own Gustavus Swift realizing it’s a lot cheaper to ship steaks instead of steer, if only a way could be found to keep them cool, “Frostbite,” published in 2024, is perfect February reading.
And in one of those delightful coincidences, I had just reached the lengthy section on bananas Monday when it was time to head over to Diana’s Bananas, whose West Side plant keeps busy supplying our nation’s hunger for frozen chocolate-covered bananas — on a stick, or sliced into 10mm “thick hockey pucks.”
“The key why the brand works, is, it’s quite simple in ingredients, but not simple in process,” said Neil Cox, Diana’s CEO. “The actual handling of fruit is quite challenging. Guess what? No two bananas are the same. Machines like to see uniformity. If it’s not the same size and shape, a machine doesn’t work that well. “
The main product has just three ingredients. The aforementioned tropical berry — bananas are not technically “fruit” — plus quality chocolate and the secret ingredient, peanut oil, that helps the chocolate shell not shatter and fall into your lap after you bite it.
Diana’s Bananas grew from a booth at the Taste of Chicago run by Jeanine Gits-Carmody, whose family had a candy company, Aunt Diana’s Candy Makers. The product wasn’t invented there; Affy Tapple made Frosty Bananas in the 1970s, and Newport Beach had a stand in the 1940s. The product picked up a little street cred when a chocolate banana became a plot point season two of that saga of Chicago culinary stress, “The Bear.”
Diana’s bananas come exclusively from Ecuador. As if coping with the vagaries of banana physiognomy were not enough, Diana’s “upcycles” its bananas, meaning rather than buy perfect bunches heading for supermarkets, it scoops up strays.
“There is a misnomer with upcycling,” Cox said. “Upcycling is not bananas kicked to the side of the road that are brown and damaged. Upcycling is a beauty contest. The way retailing wholesale fruit works only the pretty one survive. If you break off [the bunch], if you’re too big, if you’re too small, not going to be wholesale grade. Those bananas are perfect — no blemishes on them They’re rejected. And we capture them. For us it’s a loose banana handling issue. They’re not coming in perfect cases. We’re gathering them in twos and threes.”
After the bananas ripen, they’re flash frozen to 20 degrees below zero and put on a boat for the four week trip to Chicago, to receive their chocolate coating — mostly chocolate, though there are varieties such as Birthday Cake and White Chocolate Cinnamon Granola Crunch.
Keeping the product frozen is responsible for up to half the cost of a box of Diana’s Bananas. Maintaining an unbroken supply chain is not easy, particularly after shipments leave their hands.
“Our challenge is temperature abuse,” said Cox. “When we release it to a customer, it’s going through distributors, it’s going [across] docks. It’s left in places. Every time you put it in and out of a truck. The product is quite robust. And it’s winter. But in summertime we see an uptick of complaints of freezer burn. It thaws. You get ice buildup. It’s disappointment, but it’s the nature of the business. The consumer says, ‘I spent six bucks on this.’ We send them a coupon: don’t blame us — it’s the supply chain.”
Which brings us back to “Frostbite,” where the banana market is portrayed as a pinnacle of modern life.
“This story — the transformation of a perishable exotic fruit into a high-volume, mass-market, standardized commodity — is emblematic of an entire century’s worth of unceasing efforts,” writes Twilley. “Creative experimentation, expensive failures, and increasingly sophisticated solutions that lie behind the standard supermarket product aisle and its seasonless abundance.”
There’s more. I had to fight off the urge to devote a week’s worth of columns to frozen bananas, just as I had to suppress a desire to rip open a box of dark chocolate Bites in the car on the way home. An urge I submitted to as soon as I got in the door. A serving size is three slices. I ate seven.