Primera.
The original banana.
Gros Michel — the banana the Americas grew until blight wiped it out in the 1950s and '60s. It's back, grown at altitude in the Guatemalan highlands.
- Variety
- Gros Michel
- Origin
- Guatemalan highlands
- Elevation
- 1,400 m
What happened to it
Every banana you've eaten is the stand-in.
Until the 1950s, the Americas ate primarily one banana: the Gros Michel — grown as a single global monoculture. When Panama disease swept the plantations, it took the whole variety with it. The industry replaced it with the Cavendish, the banana in every supermarket today. It was chosen because it survived the blight, not because it was better.
The one we lost was the one worth eating.
The mountain it comes from
Grown slow, high, and by hand.
At 1,400 metres the air is cooler and the fruit ripens slowly. It eats creamy and full, with an aromatic, honeyed sweetness and a faint floral lift.
Where it grows
A rotation, not a plantation.
Our Gros Michel grows inside a working forest of rubber or coffee in the Guatemalan highlands — a living polyculture, not the monoculture that wiped out the variety the first time.
The Finca →From the ground
The people who grow it, in their own words.
"This soil grows the best coffee in the country. Turns out it does something special for the banana too."
— Christian, owner of a participating finca
"Up here the fruit grows slow. You can taste that it took its time."
— Enrique, owner and agronomist of a participating finca
Taste the original.
We work with chefs, specialty grocers, and trade buyers. This fruit sells itself.
Request samples