Everything’s Bananas

Things were looking grim for Tae Kim. Last year, over the course of a few months, nearly a dozen competing coffee shops opened near his business in the trendy Kerns neighborhood of Portland, Ore. Mr. Kim’s Korean cafe, Soro Soro Coffee & Dessert, an outlier when it opened in 2019, was suddenly surrounded.

Sales plummeted.

But there was a bright yellow spot: banana-flavored drinks, which he’d long offered, suddenly began outselling everything else. A newer menu item — banana cream-topped matcha garnished with Banana Kick, a puffed snack from South Korea — buoyed business. It is now his most popular drink.

“Banana is familiar and approachable,” Mr. Kim said, “but still unique enough to stand out.”

Indeed, America’s most-eaten fresh fruit is standing out with unusual and unexpected force, on cafe, bar and restaurant menus and on grocery store shelves across the country. In May, the popular protein bar brand Barebells introduced a banana-nut-bread-flavored bar. Last month, Mars began selling banana-nut-flavored M&Ms.

Trending beverages have gone bananas. Banana is in matcha. Banana is in seltzer, soft and hard. Banana is in dairy-free creamer. Banana is in canned water.

And, despite its relatively low protein content, banana is now synonymous with liquid gains at Starbucks. Last fall, the company introduced banana protein cold foam. Not to be outflavored, Dunkin’ released its own line of banana syrups and foams in March, calling banana “the flavor of the season” in a press release.

Leonid Yuffa, the owner of 20 locations of Dazbog Coffee in Colorado, would go as far as to call it the next pumpkin spice. When you sip one of his cafe’s seasonal banana lattes, “it feels like you’re on vacation,” he said.

That familiarity makes bananas ripe for experimentation, experts say. “It’s one of the last nonpolarizing foods in a polarizing world,” said Rob Smithson, a founder of Banagua, a banana water company. “Every demographic, every age group, every culture all over the world loves bananas.”

After stints in bottled water and beverage branding, Mr. Smithson set out to create a coconut water competitor. Using lab enzymes, he rapidly ages two varieties of Thai bananas — one for flavor and one for aroma — and extracts the juices to make a naturally pinkish drink with a pronounced banana flavor. Banagua, which he introduced last year, can be found at more than 3,500 stores across the country, often beside competing banana-flavored products.

“I don’t know if it’s being in the bananas business, but they are everywhere I look,” Mr. Smithson said. “Even in my dreams.”

More than 139 million metric tons of them are grown worldwide each year, making bananas the most-produced, most-consumed fresh fruit globally. They’re reliably predictable, tasting the same in schools, delis, airports and Walmart stores, where they are the most popular grocery item sold. And bananas are a foundational ingredient in vintage desserts like sundaes, puddings and flambéed Fosters.

“In the past, banana seemed like a retro play,” said Sarah Sanneh, an owner of Pies ’n’ Thighs in Brooklyn, where the banana cream pie is the top seller. “But banana water is from the year 3005.”

Banana-flavored snacks, on the other hand, can be polarizing. No doubt, someone is buying yellow Runts in bulk — why else would they sell that flavor, and that flavor only, in five-pound bags? But what most people know as banana flavor is based on a nearly extinct cultivar, the Gros Michel.

“There was a wild disconnect between anything that was banana flavored and the actual taste of bananas,” said Kevin Beary, a bartender at the Bamboo Room in Chicago. “There’s something about nailing that fresh banana taste. Everyone prefers it.”

“Everyone” includes Mr. Beary, a banana champion who sees his mixology work as correcting a historical injustice. He has created more than a dozen banana-based cocktails over his career, mostly by pulverizing fruit, passing it through a centrifuge and using the clear juice that remained to flavor syrups and spirits. How do they taste? “Exactly like biting into a banana,” he said.

In a sense, America is catching up. This banana-flavored wave began in South Korea, where the fruit has long appeared in popular snacks and drinks. Last year, diners there recorded themselves mixing coffee and banana milk from convenience stores, kicking off a global social media trend. Banana’s profile received another lift after Jennie Kim, of the K-pop group Blackpink, preached the Banana Kick gospel on “The Jennifer Hudson Show.” After the episode aired in March 2025, exports of the snack to the United States jumped by 69 percent.

But this isn’t another blip of relevancy, said Miriam Aniel Oved of the research company Tastewise, which uses generative artificial intelligence to analyze online menus, recipes and social media impressions. “We’re seeing a reinvention moment for banana,” she said.

Banana, Ms. Oved noted, belongs to a shrinking category of “legacy fruits” — cherry, apple, peach and strawberry, for example — that have lost ground to “global flavors,” like pandan and ube. Banana pulled ahead, she said, because of its milder flavor and starchy texture, which complements, well … everything.

When Eunji Lee, the owner of Lysée in Manhattan, moved to New York from South Korea, there weren’t many modern presentations of banana in fine dining. In 2017, she changed that at Jungsik, which has three Michelin stars. Her Baby Banana, a trompe-l’oeil dessert, went on to inspire a generation of fruit-shaped pastries in New York.

Banana’s appeal had always been obvious. “The challenge was making it feel special for everyone else,” she said.

At Not as Bitter, a two-year-old cafe in the East Village of Manhattan, banana lattes certainly feel special, outselling those made with durian, ube and papaya, said Jeffrey Wang, an owner. The shop’s most popular fruit and coffee combination, the Banana Split, is made with housemade coconut milk and banana pulp, a shot of espresso cascading through the cream.

“You have to keep trying new combinations,” Mr. Wang said. “Sometimes, the flavor may surprise you.” Sure, some customers are surprised to find a thick pool of baby foodlike banana pulp at the bottom of their coffee, but few protest. “To be honest,” he said, “99 percent of people like bananas.”