| Janet Binder |
BREMERHAVEN, Germany (dpa) – For Axel Krueger, the perfect banana is hard as a rock and green as grass, more than 13 and less than 17 degrees Celsius in temperature, and perfectly smooth.
The fruit the 56-year-old is holding in his hand has a black mark at the top, a “stem kink” as he calls it, noting it down on his pocket computer.
Krueger is head quality controller at one of the largest importers of bananas in Germany, the local offshoot of the multinational Chiquita.
He and his colleagues test at random the bananas that arrive once a week in the port of Bremerhaven from the tropics and later end up on supermarket shelves.
The fruit in his hand has come from the bowels of the refrigerated container ship Star First, which has docked at the cargo terminal of Heuer Port Logistics.
Tall cranes have been removing pallets from the ship since its arrival, the port is bustling.
Matthias Hasselder, General Manager of the logistics company, is on hand to watch his employees move the fruit to enormous refrigerated rooms with forklifts.
Axel Krueger, chief banana tester at the German arm of Chiquita, enters notes in a handheld computer as he checks green bananas for defects in the so-called hospital area of the warehouse in Bremerhaven, Germany. DPA
“The ship has to travel back to the tropics tonight,” he says. The ship is already being loaded with new cars at one end, while at the other end, bananas are still being unloaded from the hatches.
Around 2,500 pallets have to be unloaded. There are 48 boxes on each one, making a total of 14.4 million bananas – or “fingers” as they’re known in the trade. That’s the standard number which arrive every week to be redistributed at the latest a week later by truck.
There are still more bananas on the ship, but they’ll be reloaded onto feeder ships to be taken on to Scandinavia.
Bremerhaven handles around 400,000 tons of bananas every year. The port, along with Hamburg, Antwerp in Belgium and Rotterdam and Vlissingen in the Netherlands, belongs to the top five banana transshipment ports in Europe.
After apples, bananas are the second most popular fruit in Germany. According to the Agricultural Market Information Company, every German eats on average 12.3 kilogrammes of bananas every year.
Krueger used to climb aboard the banana ships and sniff at the ventilation shafts. If he could smell something fruity, then he knew that a “finger” had already started to ripen.
That has disastrous consequences.
“Once the process has started you can’t stop it,” says Krueger. And the affected bananas quickly “infect” the others.
“Bananas that ripen before they’re supposed to are just mush,” says Krueger.
The green bananas are brought to ripening centres around Germany before they go to the supermarkets, so that they can ripen at a controlled pace.
If Krueger smelt the distinctive ethene odour, the affected bananas had to be removed to prevent any damage to the rest of the cargo.
Now the ships are built differently, so his nose can no longer reach the ventilation shafts. Nevertheless, he’s kept his nickname, “The Banana Sniffer”.
The fruit are constantly monitored on their journey from Costa Rica via Britain and the Netherlands.
“In the tropics the bananas are put to sleep,” says Hasselder, referring to the process by which the unripe bananas are refrigerated for transport.
Krueger takes over the inspection for Chiquita when they arrive on land again, and experts from Heuer Port Logistics take on the job for other importers.
“Bananas that get removed are returned to the tropics, where they’re used for compost,” says Krueger as he stands in his control room surrounded by boxes.
It’s not just the bananas that can get damaged. “After lots of North Atlantic storms, 50 pallets have to be repaired afterwards,” he says.
The scratch on the banana in Krueger’s hand is not so bad that it needs to be sent back. “It probably happened when it was being packed,” says Krueger. The damage is still recorded however and the data sent back to the suppliers.
The spiders accidentally imported from the tropics which media so like to write about are seldom encountered by Krueger – and when he does they’re usually dead after two weeks in the fridge.
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