UK: Asda makes "green" move to Spanish bananas

Going Bananas for the Canary Islands

• Asda is the first supermarket to sell bananas from the Canary Islands

• Trial in over 200 stores with a view to being rolled out nationwide

• Carbon footprint reduced greatly as transportation time is 83% shorter

ASDA has become the first supermarket to trial bananas from the Canary Islands, in a move which is set to revolutionise the UK banana market.

The trial has been introduced in a bid to reduce carbon footprint: the fruit will be transported to mainland Spain by boat and then by road to the UK ripening centre – a total journey of four days, as opposed to 24 days for bananas from Central America.

The bananas are already very familiar to the millions of Britons who travel to the Canary Islands each year, and are a sweeter, firmer fruit than bananas produced in Central America.

The introduction of the Canary Island bananas has been made possible thanks to Asda’s ownership of IPL, the biggest single importer of produce in the UK.  IPL operates a unique sourcing model which works directly with growers at source rather than going through third-parties. IPL has agronomists based around the world who have built close relationships with growers, ensuring Asda can manage quality on the ground better than any other retailer.

Bananas are the best selling fruit at Asda, with shoppers buying over 100 million bunches a year. Bananas have been grown in the Canary Islands since the 1880s, thanks to the favourable hot and dry climate, but this is the first time they will have been exported outside of mainland Spain and Portugal – thanks to Asda’s work with IPL and Fyffes, a leading importer and distributor of bananas.

Jock Higgins, banana technical manager from IPL commented, “This is a really exciting project which we’ve been working on for over a year. Not only do we see the environmental benefit of the reduced transport time, but these bananas are pretty tasty too - we can’t wait to see what our shoppers think. If customers go bananas for them, we’ll be looking to roll the initiative out nationwide.”

The bananas, which will be marketed under the Fyffes label, are priced at £1.50 for a bunch of six, and have gone on trial this week in over 230 stores. Dependent on customer feedback the bananas will then be rolled out to further Asda stores nationwide and will be available all year round.

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Notes to Editors

About Asda Stores Ltd.

Founded in the 1960s, Asda today is one of Britain’s leading retailers. It has over 180,000 dedicated Asda colleagues serving customers from 542 stores, including 32 Supercentres, 309 Superstores, 27 Asda Living stores, 174 Supermarkets, 25 depots and seven recycling centres across the UK. It has its main home office in Leeds, Yorkshire and its George clothing division based in Lutterworth, Leicestershire. Asda serves over 18 million shoppers a week in store and its growing home shopping business at www.asda.com serves 98 per cent of UK homes. Asda joined Walmart, the world’s number one retailer, in 1999.

About Chosen By You

Chosen by you is an unprecedented re-launch of Asda’s entire mid-tier own brand range, consisting of over 7,000 products. The launch follows an intense period of quality benchmarking and independent customer taste testing, which means Asda customers are given the very best in terms of quality and value. Every single one of the products has been tested by real customers - who shop at a variety of supermarkets - up and down the country at 836 locations and only those that get a big thumbs up make it into the range. Asda have already conducted more than 450,000 blind taste tests involving over 75,000 customers, making this the biggest piece of product testing ever done by a supermarket.

About Asda’s Price Guarantee

Asda’s Price Guarantee (APG), launched in 2011, gives customers the reassurance that a basket of groceries will always be 10 per cent better value than competitors, otherwise Asda will refund the difference. Powered by MySupermarket.co.uk, the APG is the only independent, transparent online grocery price-checker in the world.

Original source: Asda