Going bananas! The scientific marketing of a ‘new’ fruit in early 20th-Century Sweden

Abstract

This paper investigates the introduction of the banana to Sweden in the early twentieth century and how “eating knowledge” of this new and exotic fruit was transferred to consumers through marketing that drew heavily upon scientific discourse. Using a case study of advertisements from Fyffes–the most dominant banana brand of the period–it employs multimodal social semiotics to identify a range of verbal and visual strategies that were adopted to turn the product into a core part of the Swedish diet. It argues that these strategies were critical in educating Swedish people about the link between food and health and shaped their (positive) attitudes toward bananas. The banana, thus, stands as a strong example of how marketing can transport, shape and transform knowledge about food, particularly at a critical time when it is first being introduced into a country.