The 10 ripening rooms at Kwik Trip’s La Crosse headquarters where ethylene gas is used to help the banana ripening process were overwhelmed with bananas this past week, leading Kwik Trip stores to have green bananas on shelves.
Every banana sold at a Kwik Trip store usually goes through the ripening room process according to Kwik Trip’s President and CEO Scott Zietlow.
“Nobody lets them ripen on their own,” he said. “They’ll all spoil or they won’t ripen, and so it’s a very processed type of thing.”
Zietlow said the bananas sold by Kwik Trip are purchased on the futures market and come from Central America through two southern ports, either Port Houston or the Port of New Orleans. They are picked when green, shipped to those ports, Zietlow said, and transported by truck or train to grocery operations in the U.S.
However, thanks to winter storms across the south in late January, the Wisconsin State Journal reported, supply chains were disrupted. Planned shipments of South American bananas were delayed. And when they finally arrived, so too did another shipment of bananas, leaving the ripening rooms at capacity in La Crosse and DeForest.
Yellow, ripened bananas are expected to return to stores in the next week or two.
