Today, we went to the Banana Factory, and for once we weren’t actually late! Actually, we were five minutes early, which is great timing for us! We first had to fill in our name and number plate and things, and we took a photo of us to be on our ticket – but Mummy only got my forehead in! We then sat in this room with a big screen on the wall where we all realised some other people were coming in, and then we had to wait ten minutes, listening to chatting that mums and dads do.
When everyone was in, the lady who worked there set up two videos on the big screen. You know bananas grow in very hot places like Costa Rica and Columbia and Ecuador? Well, these videos showed us how long it takes to get to England from all those REALLY far away places. They said on boats, and it took that short amount of time of getting there in just twenty days! Plus they were on really heavy boats, and they had lots and lots of containers full of bananas – ooh, a banana here – never-ending bananas – and in shorter words: loads of bananas.
And now I’m going to explain to you how they travel through the big factory after getting there:
When the big lorries come, they empty out the bananas out the back of the lorries and make sure they’re all healthy, as they’ve been in a big boat for twenty days and might be all manky and mouldy. Once they’ve checked about enough of them, they move in a big room that we saw today with a big number painted in white on it. That room is basically a big fridge, and the bananas are kept there for a week being made from green and hard to yellow, soft and delicious.
Then, we only saw the conveyorbelt bit, but first they all check if there’s any spiders or anything on it and put it in the right bags for different supermarkets. People then put the big bags of bananas on a big conveyor belt and send them off to another person who sticks some stickers on the packets and things. As I wasn’t one of the people after the sticker-workers, I didn’t know what else they were doing, but it was something to do with a circular conveyorbelt and do something or other with them…
I got to have a go on the conveyorbelt with William – we were probably the best, as we did five full boxes of bananas! We were doing so many that Tilly (someone doing the stickers) had to peel a sticker off the thingy-ma-bobby, put it on a banana bag, peel another one off, lean over and do the ones that were ahead of her that she hadn’t quite done yet! I think we were allowed to do four boxes, but the quick way me and William were doing it made the man not resist letting his workers off and gave us another box to do!
We also had a banana smoothie the lady made – it was delicious! She put in three bananas, two spoons of sugar (but this was for about ten people), some milk and then she mixed it all up in a mixer. It was probably the best smoothie I’d ever tasted!
There was also this man who went on a forklift truck and lifted up about 25 crates of full bananas – he had to be very careful not to drop them on his head! There were two metal bars underneath the forklift truck which then lifted up the crates and placed them back up on the shelves – but usually they’d place them somewhere else, but this man was doing a demonstration.