Congratulations to Fyffes, which is celebrating the 80th birthday of its famous blue label brand next month.

Not only do I like bananas, but they have always had a special significance to the public. There was a burst of publicity when the first Fyffes boat docked after the war, and there are not many crops that have been immortalised in song, such as the classic Harry Belafonte hit. Bananas were also greeted with acclaim when the Berlin Wall came down.

So perhaps it is not surprising that, without being partisan, I have always had a soft spot for the fruit.

It probably goes back to the time when my father, the late FPJ editor Bill Sandford, did the shopping when I was a youngster and used to park the car at Fyffes’s ripening room and distribution depot in the railway sidings at Kingston upon Thames.

How times have changed. The fruit was packed in stout wooden coffins and there was not a supermarket in sight. I learnt then that handling bananas is like living in a different world. Temperatures can have a range of effects, from colouring the green fruit to exactly the right stage, to protecting it from the outside elements.

Later, my first job as a student proved the point, as I helped mould, spray and even paint brown marks on the crowns of rubber fruit that could be hung outside greengrocers’ shops in the winter, as the real thing would have turned black.

Later on, when I was FPJ editor, invitations to Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean opened my eyes to an industry that did not simply have the luxury of growing fruit for a protected UK market. It succeeded because it was backed by a service by which growers could not only benefit from a cash crop vital to the economy, but could also set their watches by the frequency of the shipping service.

With the expansion of the European Community, bananas were also caught in the vortex of a political storm that centred on the concept of free trade versus a degree of protectionism, when the Fyffes banner, like many others, received a substantial buffeting.

Yet throughout all this, the Fyffes brand remained fixed in the British psyche, and had it been part of the most recent survey on fruit and vegetables held by AXA PPP healthcare, would probably have been recognised.

The brand has also suffered the impact of severe price cuts by the multiples. In one sense, this makes its success all the more surprising, as today many of the great fresh produce brands - plenty of which admittedly still exist - are now shadows of their former selves and in many cases have been further debilitated as they have spread across the world. They have suffered from no longer being associated simply with a single source of origin.

But the blue label is still a permanent fixture on the shelves. Long may it last.

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