Bridelia Group, one of the country’s leading growers and distributors of bananas in South Africa prides itself in its ability to ripen bananas to the exact customer requirements and therefore ensuring 100% customer satisfaction, superior fruit quality which includes colour, shelf live and taste all the time.

How does it work?

Bananas are picked from the banana plants when the fruit is still green and then it is carefully transported to the ripening facility on the Bridelia farm in Levubu. The ripening facility is a specially designed chamber that enables us to ripen a variety of fruit under specific climatic conditions, using a water cooled system, ensuring a 90% + humidity all the time and by using ethylene gas in the process. 

Ethylene gas is the most commonly commercially produced compound in the world and is used in many industrial applications. It is an odourless, harmless and colourless gas that forms a critical part of all plant development processes.

What is fruit ripening?

Fruit ripening is the term applied to describe the transition in fruit from physiologically mature and ready to consume fruit to senescence (the ageing and dying of fruit). 

At the ripening facility, the bananas are placed in specially designed bins to ensure maximum airflow to all the bananas during the ripening process through a forced air distribution process to maximise the effect of the ripening procedure. It is also a computerised technology based system that enables us at Bridelia to track and trace all fruit given a specific date and batch number. All the bananas are measured before and after the ripening procedure to monitor weight loss. 

Ensuring complete customer satisfaction all the time.