HOME COOKING WITH CHIQUITA

COMPANY HISTORY

The Chiquita brand name was created in 1944 along with the advertising icon Miss Chiquita Banana.  The United Fruit Company, Chiquita's predecessor, was the first company to apply a brand name to a banana.

Miss Chiquita was first seen by the public in a  Technicolor movie advertisement entitled "Miss Chiquita Banana's Beauty Treatment" in which she sings to an exhausted housewife.

According to Chiquita, the Chiquita Banana Song, written in 1944 and first sang by Patti Clayton, was played by U.S. radio stations 376 times a day.  It remains one of the top all-time advertising jingles.

While previous promotional recipes and cookbooks and magazine ads touted the consumption of the banana  in general, the company began to use the character and the Chiquita name in much (although not all) of the material published afterwards.

Beginning in 1962, the small blue stickers with the Chiquita name began appearing on the individual pieces of fruit.  The graphics on stickers occasionally changed over the years, and the earlier ones are considered highly collectible today.

The Chiquita brand was introduced to Europe in 1967.

In 1970, the United Fruit Company merged with a company who held the John Morrell brand name (AMK) and the new name United Brands was put into use as the parent company name.  This merger was in part due to financial troubles and to the fact that fresh fruit consumption was down as more people turned to processed fruit and other foods.

It was at this time that the company began to seriously expand and diversify their holdings to include the processed foods business.

In 1985, United Brands began applying the Chiquita brand to other fruits besides bananas, such as pineapples and grapefruit.

In 1988 the company name, United Brands, was changed to Chiquita Brands International, Inc.  to increase global name recognition for all of its products.

Chiquita Brands purchased a private label vegetable canner, Friday Canning Corporation, in 1992 and in 1997 acquired Owatonna Canning Company and American Fine Foods.  The acquisition of Stokely USA Inc. was completed in 1998.

The year 1997 saw the original Miss Chiquita character and the popular jingle lyrics updated.

In 2003, Chiquita Processed Foods, the vegetable canning subsidiary, was sold to Seneca Foods.  This is the year that they also launched Chiquita Fresh Cut Fruit.  In 2004 they acquired Fresh Express, the number one seller of packaged salads in the United States.

Chiquita has come a long way from selling only bananas.  Today they now offer consumers a variety of products:  other fresh fruits and vegetables such as apples, kiwi, avocados, grapes, cherries, melon, and more;  fresh cut fruit; a variety of fruit juices and fruit juice beverages; packaged foods such as baby food and Tostones; and the Fresh Cut packaged salads.  They provide a variety of processed banana products to others in the food processing industry such as banana puree, banana flakes, and extracts.

To appeal to those favoring Nuevo Latin cuisine, Chiquita now sells pre-cooked, frozen plantain slices.  Plantains are cousins of the banana and are popular in Latin America.

Today, Chiquita Brands International, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the largest producer and supplier of bananas in the United States.  Worldwide, they employ more than 26,000 full-time employees.

Visit the official Chiquita website.