Bananas are considered the fourth most important food crop in the world, after the three main cereals rice, wheat and corn.
World production statistics are not very accurate as in many countries bananas are produced in home gardens or small plots that often escape the reporting.
For many years fresh bananas have had the highest per-capita consumption of any fresh fruit in the U.S. They displaced apples in the early 1990’s.
In the tropical countries of all continents, bananas have been a staple food for centuries.
The seedless bananas consumed today in the industrialized countries are the result of long painstaking selection and breeding, some done by our primitive ancestors.Until a few years ago banana seeds from seminal verities were used in breeding. Tissue culture is widely used at present to improve the verities.
Although fresh bananas are widely consumed in develop countries, the consumption of processed banana products is less than that of other processed fruits. Several attempts to launch consumer products such as canned sliced bananas in syrup have failed.
This is partially because fresh ripe bananas are readily available year-round, even in the northern countries, thanks to a remarkable logistics and marketing system.
On the other hand, seasonal crops such as apples produce an abundant crop in a short time.
In the not too distant past, the only way to use so many apples in the short crop period was to process them into products such as juice and applesauce.
There is no such pressure with bananas, they are produced any time of the year with little volume variation.
Therefore, the volume of processed banana products has developed slowly. Also this situation makes the quality of the processed banana products vulnerable to comparison with the readily available fresh “real thing.”
Canned peaches in syrup do not resemble fresh peaches in flavor and aroma, but between crops one either has canned peaches or no peaches at all.
Processed bananas are still produced mostly from rejected of the fresh banana trade. Therefore, the varieties used are the same as for fresh fruit, but there has been a decline in the number of varieties being grown, resulting in only a few selected varieties and sub-varieties of the Cavendish type being used for processing.
Processed Banana
