All Good’s Bad Wrap

We’d anticipated it, but the issue stood out the day we started selling All Good bananas in supermarkets: “You’re selling organic, Fairtrade bananas in plastic bags? WTAF!”

The customer was right, aren’t they always? You can’t be all good in bad packaging.

In our defence, the supermarkets we were trying to impress told us no one would recognise the difference between conventional bananas that sold for $2.99 (back in 2010) and our Fairtrade ones, which were a dollar more. Including their checkout operators. Fair enough, all bananas look the same.

So, somehow, we had to wrap them. We wanted to use tape to hold a bunch together and to use the space to show a barcode and explain why they cost more; that idea didn’t fly, so we took the buyers’ advice and put them in plastic bags, which turned out to be more of a problem than a solution.

Even if the bag did have a barcode, bananas in sweaty plastic weren’t appealing, and without quite knowing why, produce managers weren’t rushing to order them either.

Then shoppers started asking: why are you selling bananas in plastic bags when they’re already wrapped? Eventually our supermarket buyer agreed we could use plastic tape, a lesser evil.

That thin strip turned out to be a great place to explain why a better banana cost a dollar more, and what that dollar paid for. The constraint was the answer. But the plastic was still a worry.

All Good has a few fundamental values wrapped up in a company name: good for the land, good for the growers, good for you. It’s hard to argue that a wrapper that takes 400 years to break down into microplastics is good for anyone.

So, ever since we began importing Fairtrade bananas, everyone we work with has been experimenting with alternatives; we’ve tried all sorts of paper types, pretty much all of them got soggy and fell apart. The challenge has been to find a substrate that can withstand the 21-day trip our bananas make from the farms where they’re grown in Ecuador to fruit bowls in Aotearoa.

The wrapper had two jobs at once. It had to survive the journey and earn its keep by telling shoppers what made the fruit worth more. Bananas that were washed and packed in Ecuador for shipment across the Pacific for three weeks in a dark, humid, climate-controlled container rubbing up against other bunches required wrapping that was waterproof, strong enough to withstand handling, and sticky enough to prevent people from peeling and scanning the fruit as the cheaper kind.

We tried everything: wax dipping, laser etching, bagasse (a plant-based alternative to plastic), paper, compostable and cardboard variants. They failed in humid conditions or slowed down hand-labelling, which, at thousands of bunches a week, wasn’t an option. Plastic tape was better than plastic bags. Not perfect. We hated it, but until someone redesigned the checkout, tape was how Fairtrade showed up and scanned. It also had a small amount of space for us to explain what made All Good Bananas all good.

This year we finally cracked it: a compostable, paper-based tape that does both jobs—tough enough for the journey, and still room to tell the story—without the plastic. It took five and a half thousand days to take the sticky plastic tape off All Good Bananas. We’re not sure whether to throw a party or write an apology.

Along the way, we built something that’s all good in itself.

Thanks to everyone who has ever bought one of the 50 million bunches of All Good Bananas sold to date, we’ve collectively provided a steady, dependable income, health and education for hundreds of small Fairtrade farming families in Ecuador. And we’ve made an already-small footprint smaller still, now that the tape’s compostable too.

Draft 2 in place. Before publishing: confirm the latest grower figures and the compostable-tape launch date, add gallery/film credits, and record the audio narration if we want the player on this one.