IT’S ALL GOOD
How the ethical banana came to New Zealand
How the ethical banana came to New Zealand.
All Good were the first to bring organically grown Fairtradecertified bananas to New Zealand. Here’s how they did it.
Chris Morrison is the co-founder of Phoenix Organics, bought by Charlie’s for $10 million in 2005. Simon Coley had been developing and marketing new products at 42 Below, which Bacardi purchased in 2006 for $138 million.
Along with Chris’ brother Matthew, who was working as a bureaucrat in Treasury, in 2008 all three were looking for a new challenge.
Chris had seen how the Pacific’s banana trade had been devastated by globalisation, and how perfectly good organic bananas going to waste in Samoa. In a former life Simon had worked for Greenpeace and helped campaign to restore the banana trade between The Windward Isles and Britain. For many years the Windward Isles had remained politically and economically stable on the back of their banana industry.
There was a parallel with Samoa. Re-establishing a fair export market could ensure economic independence and security for banana famers.
BRINGING ANY NEW PRODUCT TO MARKET IS CHALLENGING. CREATING AN ENTIRELY NEW CATEGORY IN PERISHABLE FRESH PRODUCE AND CHARGING A PREMIUM IS BANANAS.
Chris, Matt and Simon decided they would do for New Zealand’s bananas what the Fairtrade and organic movement was doing for coffee. They would recreate this partnership in the Pacific. Surely Kiwis would choose fresh fruit from our Pacific Island neighbours?
But fresh fruit coming into New Zealand must be sprayed for biosecurity. How could All Good get these bananas to market in tip-top organic condition? Would sealed climatecontrolled shipping containers kill the bugs? Could they skip the spray? Unfortunately a large beetle flew out of All Good’s first container, straight onto the face of the inspector.
The spray ended any hope of organic certification; it also turned the Samoan bananas to mush. So All Good innovated. They dried and packed Samoan bananas before shipping them to New Zealand. They then recruited Amsterdam-based Fairtrade fruit distributor AgroFair to find fresh bananas from another source.
It was this partnership that led them to the El Guabo Association of Small Banana Farmers in Ecuador – a group of 150 small family farmers who had formed one of the world’s first Fairtrade farmer cooperatives.
But there was another problem. All Good wasn’t allowed to ship bananas from El Guabo to New Zealand. A competing banana firm had an exclusive deal with the shipping line.
“There were three government-approved source countries for bananas, explains Matthew. “We’d tried Samoa. The Philippines had no Fairtrade bananas. Now we couldn’t get them from Ecuador. We were stuck.”
After 18 months El Guabo threatened to boycott the shipping line unless they were allowed to ship bananas to New Zealand. The shipping line gave in. All Good ordered its first bananas and had ten days to get them from ship to shops to family fruit bowl before they went off. It was time to get selling. Chris had natural allies in specialist food shops, but All