TOO big, too straight or too bendy: growing the perfect banana isn’t easy, but one Queensland grower has found a lucrative solution that has turned his farm waste into an income stream.
Queensland banana grower Rob Watkins has designed and built a factory on his Walkamin plantation that turns green Lady Finger bananas into powder.
“My motto is if you can’t find the answer to a question, create one,” Mr Watkins said.
“And so I did – our processing facility is the first of its kind in the world.”
Once washed and peeled, the bananas are dehydrated and milled in a pharmaceutical grade factory – it’s a process that takes just 25 minutes, but it adds three years to the fruit’s shelf life.
Having soft-launched his ‘banana flour’ locally in 2010, Mr Watkins and his wife, Krista, stepped up to commercial production in 2014 and since then the business, called Natural Evolution Foods, has experienced exponential growth.
Their banana flour is now sold in hundreds of health and specialty shops across the country.
They’ve also expanded their product line to include a baking flour from Cavendish bananas and a smoothie mix.
The factory can produce five tonnes of powder a week, which accounts for the eight to 10 tonnes of fruit that was being wasted on his property each week.
He said demand for the product is being driven by the appetite for gluten free substitutes, but also because green bananas are one of the highest resistant starch food sources in the world.
The $3.8 million state-of-the-art processing facility, which was partly funded by the federal government through its innovation funding push, can dehydrate other fruits and vegetables, too.
“We’re finalising our research into gold sweet potato powder which we hope to market as a supplement grade powder,” he said.
“Where we’re going, it’s going to be more profitable to focus on making flour than growing fruit.”
The business has the potential to support the flailing banana industry of the Cairns region.
“There are thousands of growers in Far North Queensland around us and this creates another market for them and not just for their waste either.”
Now, the world is knocking on the Watkins’ door. They have fielded interest from food and pharmaceutical companies from Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“We’ve had the whole world come to visit and talk about our products – it’s been unreal.”
Ambitiously, Mr Watkins designed the factory with global expansion in mind.
“Its modular design is such that we can take our model anywhere and replicate it.”
