Bananas from plantation to fruit bowl: grown, packed, shipped, ripened

By Alykhan Virani. Published 2026-10-10.

Part 2 of the series From source to store.

India grew 37.6 million tonnes of bananas in 2024, 27.0% of the world total, yet it exported 0.70 million tonnes, 2.9% of the fruit that crossed a border. Ecuador grew 5.4% of the crop and shipped 27.8% of the traded fruit by weight (FAOSTAT; CEPII BACI, HS code 0803). Most bananas never cross a border, and the export trade itself draws on one banana group, Cavendish, which supplied 99% of banana exports in a 2018 scientific review (Dita et al., 2018). This post follows that fruit from plantation to fruit bowl.

How it is grown

A banana plant is a giant herb. The “trunk” is a pseudostem of overlapping leaf sheaths with no woody tissue, and it can carry a bunch of 50 kilograms or more (ProMusa, accessed October 2026). The stem fruits once and dies back, and a shoot from the underground rhizome, called a sucker, takes its place (ProMusa). Cultivated bananas no longer reproduce sexually on their own, so growers multiply them as copies (ProMusa). A Dole nursery in the Philippines grew more than 1,000 plantable seedlings from one pup in about 10 months by tissue culture, and on the farm visited a stem carried about 200 bananas, a figure that varies with variety and altitude (ITOCHU, 2015 farm visit). FAO’s postharvest guide gives 11 to 13 months from planting to harvest (FAO, 2004).

ProMusa estimates Cavendish made up 57% of world banana production in 2018, and its cultivars, such as Grande Naine and Williams, are propagated vegetatively, so plants within a cultivar are near-identical (ProMusa, Cavendish subgroup). Gros Michel shows what that can cost. Fusarium wilt (Panama disease), a soil fungus first reported in export plantations in Panama in 1890, forced the export industry to drop the Gros Michel variety for Cavendish by the mid-1950s (FAO Food Outlook, 2019). The fungus spreads in infected plants, soil on shoes, vehicles and tools, and water, and its resting spores can survive more than 20 years in soil (FAO, 2019; Dita et al., 2018). Tropical Race 4 (TR4), the strain that infects Cavendish, was found in Taiwan in 1970 and reached Latin America at La Guajira, Colombia, in August 2019 (FAO, 2019). FAO’s 2026 review lists TR4 as confirmed in 24 countries and reports no effective fungicide or eradication method (FAO Banana Market Review 2025). Ecuador’s plant protection agency reported its first detection, in Santa Rosa canton, El Oro, in an IPPC pest report dated 19 December 2025, citing laboratory results received on 15 December (IPPC).

FAOSTAT’s “bananas” item excludes plantains, and it counted 139.3 million tonnes from 140 countries in 2024. India grew 27.0%, China 8.4%, Indonesia 6.6%, Ecuador 5.4% and Brazil 5.1% (FAOSTAT). Yields differ: in 2022 Ecuador averaged 36.28 tonnes per hectare (INEC survey), against 54.15 in Costa Rica, 31.91 in the Philippines and 24.06 in Colombia (FAOSTAT, via the Ecuador Ministry of Agriculture); Ecuador reached 40.87 in 2023. FAO put typical smallholder yields at 10 to 15 tonnes per hectare in 2019. Farm size varies as widely: 78% of Ecuador’s banana growers worked fewer than 10 hectares in 2023 and 2% worked 100 hectares or more (INEC survey, estimated counts). Fresh Del Monte grew about 47% of the bananas it sold on company-controlled farms in 2025 and bought the rest from independent growers (Form 10-K for fiscal 2025). The work is manual: farmers bag each bunch and cushion it by hand (ITOCHU, 2015).

From plantation to packing house

Growers cut bunches green. FAO’s guide sets harvest when the fingers reach three-quarter or full shape, depending on the market (FAO, 2004). Bunches reach the packing house by cableway, among other methods (FAO, 2004), and a Colombian cableway supplier said that hooking bunches in the field and moving them straight to the packing area limits contact points (FreshPlaza, 10 December 2025). Workers there cut each bunch into 8 to 14 hands, wash them in tanks, treat the cut crowns and pack clusters in corrugated boxes (FAO, 2004).

The standard export box holds 18.14 kilograms net, and 54 boxes fill a pallet, about 980 kilograms of fruit (Fyffes product specification, 2021). Ecuador’s Ministry of Agriculture set a minimum price of $7.25 per 18.14-kilogram box for 2025, up from $6.85 in 2024 (Primicias, October 2024). The $7.25 minimum is the farm-gate price and works out to about $400 a tonne; the minimum for a box loaded on the ship, $9.50, works out to about $524 a tonne, against an average Ecuadorian export unit value of $603 a tonne in 2025 (Primicias, October 2024; FAO, 2026).

The cold chain starts here. Fresh Del Monte describes keeping fruit in a continuous temperature-controlled environment from harvest to distribution (Form 10-K for fiscal 2025), and Dole stamps each box with a code that traces it to the farm, the packing plant and the date (ITOCHU, 2015).

Moving it

The world exported 24.1 million tonnes of bananas worth $15.6 billion in 2024 (CEPII BACI, HS 0803). That HS code also covers plantains and dried fruit; the fresh-banana line, HS 080390, holds 92.9% of the value. Ecuador shipped 6.72 million tonnes worth $4.23 billion, 27.1% of world value, followed by Colombia at 10.1%, Guatemala at 9.8%, the Philippines at 9.3% and Costa Rica at 9.3%, so five countries hold 65.6%; the rank order differs by product and by weight, and Guatemala is second by weight. Fresh banana exports (HS 080390) equaled 83.8% of Ecuador’s FAOSTAT banana output by weight in 2024, 32.9% of the Philippines’ and 1.8% of India’s, ratios across two datasets.

The United States took 18.5% of world import value ($2.89 billion), Germany 6.4%, China 6.3%, Japan 6.0% and the Netherlands 5.9% (CEPII BACI). Single routes carry large shares: Guatemala sold 71.9% of its exports ($1.09 billion) to the United States, the Philippines sold 50.9% ($740 million) to Japan, which took 79.6% of its 2024 banana import value from the Philippines (CEPII BACI), and Ecuador sold 14.4% ($609 million) to Russia. The Philippines also sold 17.7% to China, 16.1% to South Korea, 4.6% to Saudi Arabia and 3.7% to Iran (CEPII BACI). FAO lists the EU, the Middle East, Russia and the United States as Ecuador’s main destinations in 2025 (FAO, 2026).

Boxes travel in reefers, meaning refrigerated ships and containers. Green fruit rides at a pulp temperature of 13 to 14 °C, and below 13 °C chilling injury can set in within 2 to 24 hours (WFLO Commodity Storage Manual, 2018). Fresh Del Monte ran six owned refrigerated container ships, one chartered ship and about 11,000 refrigerated containers at the end of 2025 (Form 10-K). Transit times vary by lane. Port Everglades in Florida lists 8 days from Guayaquil, 9 from Puerto Limón in Costa Rica, 4 from Santo Tomás de Castilla in Guatemala and 3 from Cartagena in Colombia (Port Everglades, accessed October 2026). In 2014 an MSC rotation was adjusted to carry reefer cargo from Guayaquil to Antwerp in 17 days (Fresh Fruit Portal, June 2014). The Davao to Japan crossing takes about five days (ITOCHU, 2015).

Two ports show how concentrated lanes can be. El Diario reported that the port authority of Puerto Bolívar, in El Oro province, recorded 69,474 tonnes of bananas exported in January 2026, and that the paper said Russia took all of it; FAO says Russia buys almost exclusively from Ecuador (El Diario, 2026; FAO, 2026). The Port of Antwerp-Bruges handled a record 1,170,394 TEU of reefer containers in 2025, with about 90% of reefer imports being fresh products including fruit, vegetables and meat or fish, mostly from Latin America; the release does not break out bananas (Port of Antwerp-Bruges, 16 February 2026).

Bananas cannot wait. Mature-green fruit keeps up to 4 weeks in ethylene-free air at 14 °C, or 6 weeks under a modified atmosphere (WFLO, 2018). In the US trade the harvest-to-shelf window is about two weeks (American Farm Bureau Federation, January 2025), and an Ecuadorian exporter reported journeys of up to 40 days to Central Asia via St. Petersburg (FreshPlaza, 18 September 2026). See FOB and CIF for how freight enters the price.

Ripening and getting it to you

Rooms for ripening hold 14 to 18 °C at 90 to 95% humidity, and operators add about 100 parts per million of ethylene gas for 24 to 48 hours; ripening then takes 4 days at the warm end to 8 to 10 days at the cool end (WFLO, 2018). In Japan the fruit spends five to seven days in a temperature-controlled room (ITOCHU, 2015). Fresh Del Monte ran 31 distribution centers in 2025, generally with cold storage and banana ripening in markets including the United States, South Korea and Saudi Arabia (Form 10-K for fiscal 2025).

A 2015 study for the Make Fruit Fair campaign, a modelled estimate for a medium-size producer, split the European retail price of Ecuadorian bananas into 42.4% for retail, 20.4% for shipping and import, 10.6% for ripening, 8.6% for tariffs, 6.9% for workers’ wages, 6.8% for production and 4.3% for export, with retail the largest share (BASIC, October 2015). Separately, Fresh Del Monte’s banana segment earned a 4.8% gross margin before selling and administrative costs in 2025 on $1,490.4 million of sales, against 5.9% in 2024 (Form 10-K for fiscal 2025).

Where the chain is thin

Weather

Wind above 35 kilometers an hour can shred banana leaves and cut yields (FAO, 2004). Costa Rica’s exports fell 8.2% to 2.2 million tonnes in 2025, the lowest since 2019, after heavy rain and black Sigatoka (FAO, 2026), a leaf fungus that can cut yields by 35% to 50% where it is not sprayed (ProMusa, Black leaf streak).

Disease

FAO’s November 2019 review reported TR4 on about 15,700 of 440,000 hectares of Philippine banana land (survey year not stated), and a 1,500-hectare Mozambique farm that ceased operating within 4 years of detection; it says infected land is unusable for decades and no effective fungicide exists (FAO, 2019).

One variety

A 2018 review put Cavendish at 99% of banana exports (Dita et al., 2018). The earlier Race 1 outbreak forced the switch away from Gros Michel by the mid-1950s, with losses to trade equal to about $2.3 billion in 2019 dollars (FAO Food Outlook, November 2019).

Ports and routes

A three-day US port strike, 1 to 3 October 2024, whose overall impact the American Farm Bureau Federation called relatively muted, affected a trade in which 76% of US banana imports in January 2024 (422,000 tonnes) entered through containerized East Coast ports (American Farm Bureau Federation, January 2025). Shipment disruptions in the Red Sea hurt Fresh Del Monte’s Middle East banana sales in 2024 (Form 10-K for fiscal 2025).

Follow the data

The bananas commodity page holds the production and trade tables behind these numbers, and the trade flows report maps each route. The producing, exporting and processing guide explains why India leads growing while Ecuador leads shipping. For the two leading shippers, see Ecuador and the Philippines.

Prices are monthly benchmark averages that lag the market; informational only, not investment advice.