Chiquita-to-Go offers a healthy snack alternative

From June 2007

By Janet Groeber

Chiquita Brands sold nearly 2.3 billion pounds of bananas in North America last year, nearly all of them in bunches at grocery stores.

But fresh off a 200-store test, individual bananas are now available in more than 7,500 convenience store locations nationally.

The rationale behind the Chiquita-to-Go program is to provide options for consumers “who have asked for healthy snack choices at different times of the day,” says director of corporate communications Michael Mitchell. “It fits perfectly within our strategy of offering convenient, healthy food choices.”

The c-stores like it because they “are now able to offer a product that’s a healthy alternative to salty snacks and candy.” And it’s appealing to Chiquita because “it’s a higher-margin product for us compared to our traditional grocery store channel.”

Chiquita suggests that retailers sell individual bananas for between 75 cents and 99 cents – in line with the price of a candy bar or bag of chips. That translates to somewhere between two and three times more, on a per-pound basis, than they typically sell for in supermarkets. Chiquita has designed a P-O-P “box” to be placed next to the register or near other snacks.

According to company research, 42 percent of consumers indicate “they would eat more bananas if they were available in more locations,” Mitchell says. The overwhelming majority - 86 percent - also said they prefer to eat bananas that are all yellow or yellow with just green tips.

Greenish bananas sell at supermarkets because customers know they’ll ripen naturally at home. But the c-store buyer likely wants to consume the fruit immediately, “so delivering bananas at that right stage of ripeness to convenience stores has been the challenge,” Mitchell says.

Helping bananas breathe
To do that, Chiquita needed to control the ripening process, which meant regulating bananas’ oxygen and carbon dioxide respiration. It turned to Landec, a company that had developed and deployed a technology for packaging pharmaceutical drugs with limited shelf life. Landec found that the technology could be adapted to prevent the over-ripening of bananas, and formed Apio in 2005 to promote it.

Guadalupe, Calif.-based Apio provides its proprietary packaging technology for shelf-life-sensitive fruit and vegetables under the BreatheWay banner. In Chiquita’s case, it is able to extend shelf life from one to two days (under normal ripening) to eight to nine days through the use of a special packaging membrane, which provides a “gateway, if you will, for a very specific exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide into and out of a package,” says Cali Tanguay, Apio’s manager of business development.

Product-specific exchange rates passively create an ideal atmosphere for the items inside the package, “thus lowering the respiration rate and the consumption of internal energy stores, thereby extending the life of the fresh fruits and vegetables.”

For Chiquita, repackaging bananas for individual sale at c-stores also meant rethinking its standard 40-lb. boxes. Fingers, as the individual bananas are called, are now packed into 20-lb. boxes outfitted with the membrane. “As long as the [membrane] patch isn’t broken on the box, the bananas stay at the right stage of ripeness,” allowing stores “to have perfectly ripe bananas throughout the week,” Mitchell says.

If Chiquita is able to add coffee shops as well as additional c-store chains, its new distribution strategy could yield as many as 200,000 to 300,000 new retail outlets for the company.