Karsten Kunibert Krüger-Kopiske - Die deutsche Kühlschifffahrt - German Reefer Shipping

The most famous banana label is still Chiquita. The label has been fairly consistent since the 1960s and, due to the massive PR campaign that has now been running for 70 consecutive years, most people immediately associate bananas with this brand name, although there are also older brands such as Fyffes.

The story of this descendant of the former United Fruit Company (“UFCO”) is fascinating. Historically, the UFCO had a somewhat split personality. The UFCO was responsible for the development of large parts of Latin America: it built railways, model cities, established a general health system, set up schools and research centres and employed thousands and thousands of people. On the other hand, there were political controversies and the company was approaching a monopoly in the US market. Antitrust laws forced the company to split up.

Today, many of the big banana companies are no longer the all-powerful corporations that once dominated entire countries. Nevertheless, the actions of the past sometimes affect today’s business. When Chiquita celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1999, a number of special commemorative labels were issued to mark the occasion. They were used to mark fruit that was sold throughout Europe but never made it to the U.S. market, an obvious management reaction at the time due to bad publicity following a series of articles in a Cincinnati newspaper.

Today, banana companies use banana labels to promote school lunches or anniversaries and to sponsor major sporting events such as the Olympics or World Championships. However, the EU/WTO controversy mentioned above also led to one of the strangest banana stickers: a French-language protest sticker was illegally affixed to Chiquita bananas by local activists in Belgium.

And what began with the labelling of bananas has developed into something much bigger. Nowadays, many different kinds of fruit and vegetables are branded and consequently labelled. No doubt you have seen labelled oranges, apples and pears from almost every country in the world. As a result, the entire fruit labelling industry has developed into an industry in its own right. Although it may seem like a nuisance, stickers are not just a simple PR tool to promote a brand name nowadays.

Today’s stickers or labels have more of a function than just scanning the price at the checkout. The PLU code or Price Look Up number printed on the sticker tells you how the fruit was grown. Reading the PLU code indicates whether the fruit was genetically modified, organically grown or produced with chemical fertilizers, fungicides or herbicides. Basically the PLU code can be divided into three different groups:

1. If the PLU code contains only four digits, the product has been grown conventionally or “traditionally” using chemicals. These four letters indicate the type of vegetable or fruit; for example, all bananas are marked with the code 4011;

2. If the PLU code contains five digits and the number begins with “8” the fruit or vegetable is genetically modified. A genetically modified or GMO banana would have code 84011;

3. If the PLU code contains five digits and the number begins with a “9”, it means that the product has been organically grown and cannot be genetically modified. An organic banana would be labelled with the number 94011.

By the way, the glue used to attach the stickers is considered food-safe, but the stickers themselves are not necessarily edible. Here are six interesting facts:

1. Fruit stickers are mostly edible nowadays, they are made of “edible paper” or other food-safe materials, so eating one or two stickers will not harm you. Nevertheless it is better to simply peel them off!

2. The sticker is food safe, at least that is what the FDA tells people in the USA.

3. PLU codes are the same everywhere!

4. Do you find it difficult to remove fruit labels? Stick some tape on it to remove them. They say it works...at least on apples!

5. Laser-applied “fruit tattoos” could make stickers obsolete in the future.

6. You can turn fruit stickers into art, provided you haven’t eaten them. Or start collecting them. In fact, collecting banana stickers is something bigger than many people might think. Soon after banana stickers became widespread, people started to actually collect them. The oldest known collectors started somewhere in the 1970s. This meant — like collecting stamps — keeping the collected stickers in books. With the beginning of the worldwide use of the Internet, collecting banana stickers took on a whole new dimension. The first banana label collections went online as early as 1996, even though only a few pure banana label websites were active at that time.

Collecting banana labels seems to be very popular in the U.S., Germany, Costa Rica and Ecuador, and “Der Spiegel”, a weekly German news magazine, already had a documentation series on the Internet in 1996. The fourth and last part showed a screenshot of a banana label website.

In 2001 several collectors decided to organize the “1st Meeting of Banana Collectors”, which took place in Munich and attracted 19 participants from all over the world. In 2002, the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem had a five-month exhibition entitled “...banana stickers of all things”, in which some 2500 labels were shown.

During the Fruit Logistica 2006 in Berlin, several banana sticker collectors also met, followed by the “4th Banana Sticker Collectors’ Meeting”, which took place again in Munich during 2006.

Some of the well-known names in the banana collectors’ scene have created websites where all the labels are displayed. Becky Martz has 14,491 different labels in her collection at the time of writing this article, while Elvis Velez from Guayaquil has about 16,000 in his collection.

Some of the top collectors are based in Costa Rica: Walter Ugalde from Cariari (Limón) counts over 18,000 different labels, while Pablo Barquero Lopez from Guapiles (who started collecting in 1977) now counts over 20,000 labels. It was also Pablo who chaired the 2008 “Banana Collectors Conference for Banana Labels”, known as “Tico Ban 2008”, which attracted collectors from around the world to Costa Rica.

Banana labels continue to fascinate people. It will be another 15 years or so before Fyffes’ “Blue Label” turns 100 years old, but no doubt there will be many different reasons for massive or small series of commemorative or special labels in the coming years, as we have seen in the last half century.

FRIGORIFRIQUE

Die FRIGORIFRIQUE war das erste Kühlschiff der Welt, wurde jedoch nicht als solches gebaut. Entstanden 1870 auf der Thomas Royden & Sons Werft in Liverpool als EBOE für die britische Elder Dempster Reederei wurde sie zuerst im Passagier- und Frachtdienst zwischen Großbritannien und Westafrika eingesetzt. Der Franzose Charles Tellier erwarb das Schiff 1875 und installierte hier sein Kühlsystem. Sie brachte Gefrierfleisch von Buenos Aires nach Rouen. Dieser Dienst war wirtschaftlich jedoch nur teilweise erfolgreich, weshalb bereits 1881 der Verkauf an die französische Worms & Cie. erfolgte und das Schiff zum reinen Trockenfrachter umgebaut wurde. 1884 sank die FRIGORIFRIQUE im Englischen Kanal in Küstennähe.

DUNEDIN

Das bereits 1874 gebaute Vollschiff DUNEDIN der Albion Line (später Shaw, Savill & Albion) wurde 1882 mit einer dampfbetriebenen Bell-Coleman-Gefrieranlage ausgestattet. Die zweite Reise von Neuseeland nach London wurde ein voller Erfolg, und das Schiff war das erste, das Lammfleisch von der Südhalbkugel nach Großbritannien brachte. 1883 wurde das Rigg zur Bark reduziert. Im März 1890 ging das Schiff auf einer Reise von Omaru (NZL) nach London verloren.