Gone Bananas!

I left Saturday morning for a two day trip to Tortuguero National Park. Tortuguero is a protected area on the Carribean side of the country where sea turtles return each year to lay eggs. On the drive here, we stopped briefly at a banana packing plant. I’m pretty sure it’s a Del Monte facility. Here, they pack 3000 boxes, each with 110 – 120 bags of bananas, every day. Did you know that the thing that grows bananas isn’t a banana tree, it’s a banana plant? The root is buried beneath the soil and each plant is only good for one cluster of bananas. It takes 6 months for the plant to grow and the cluster to be ready for harvest so the “trees” are planted in cycles so they can harvest year round.
The bananas are harvested and carried to the plant through a system of pulleys.

Here, the bananas are stripped from the cluster and separated into those for export, those for use in Costa Rica, and those that are either too small or too big are used for baby food.

The bananas are then rinsed and loaded into plastic containers. If they are going to Europe, the bananas are then bagged.


Finally, each bunch is weighed.

Picture this the next time you bring home a bunch of bananas!