This is MIT and yes, we have bananas

President L. Rafael Reif gave a shout-out to the Banana Lounge in May 2022 in his last presidential charge to the graduating class. “In its charming quirkiness, the Banana Lounge is ‘very MIT,’” Reif said. Then he ticked off an impressive (and MIT-like) list of reasons for its success: students prototyped the lounge and tested it in real-world conditions, analyzed multiple fruits and supply chains to minimize cost, tracked and calibrated environmental conditions for the fruit, secured funding from Feld, and “developed the cutting-edge concept of ‘free coffee.’” 

“Already, the lounge has served more than 500,000 bananas—two of which were mine,” Reif said, noting that he prefers mangoes. 

In November 2022, Admissions blogger Amber Velez ’24 proclaimed the Banana Lounge the fourth-best place to sleep on campus. It beat out the Hayden and Barker libraries but was bested by the Course [x] Lounge (where x is any integer from 1 to 24), “your empty classroom after recitation,” and “your 9 a.m. class.” 

The lounge remains entirely student run, although MIT does provide cleaning services. In 2018, students would lace up their sneakers and run to Yell-O-Glow, a giant banana-ripening facility in Chelsea, to pick up full crates and Uber them back to campus. At one point they got bananas from MIT dining halls, which also sourced from Yell-O-Glow through a produce supplier; while that was convenient, adding two layers of middlemen resulted in significant bruising (affecting 5% to 20% of bananas) and more waste. But consumption has since increased enough to support a separate order to Yell-O-Glow. Students email their order by midnight three times a week, and by around eight the next morning, the company delivers 40-pound 100-banana crates to the Stata loading dock. The students get the pallets from there to the lounge, taking great care to minimize bruising. 

Ahrens says it’s been critical to optimize the supply chain, which extends 3,000 miles to Central America and spans a couple of weeks from harvest to lounge. They’ve focused their efforts on the final days and miles, he notes. Their top priority is reliability—providing students 24-7 access to bananas—and they aim to maximize quality as they minimize waste, cost, and student labor, all while dealing with the constraints of the lounge’s limited space and the speed at which bananas ripen (which is temperature sensitive). 

MALTE AHRENS ’17

The Banana Lounge team has collaborated with experts from the likes of Del Monte and AgroAmerica; Ahrens and Thérèse Mills ’21 even flew to Central America on a mission to trace the banana supply chain from planting, picking, cutting, cleaning, packing, shipping, and ripening all the way through delivery to the lounge. “But our greatest teacher has been necessity and learning from our mistakes along the way,” says Ahrens. They’ve had to deal with under- and overripe bananas, too many and not enough, unexpected campus events, snowstorms, missed deliveries, AC failures, and cold damage in the winter, to name a few challenges.

“We have great data,” says Ahrens. “Every delivery we’ve ever had has been logged (594 deliveries) with notes on quality, ripeness, company, and country of origin, and we check in on the space three times a day on average, logging banana levels and busyness, among other data points. From this we can predict with decent accuracy consumption at any hour and track recurring issues to raise with Yell-O-Glow and/or the banana companies. For example, when there was an issue with bananas splitting, we were able to alert that banana company and, with them, trace it back to an issue they had unloading at the port.”