If you’ve read a few of my recent Friday blogs, you’ll have noticed a recurring theme. I’m a little obsessed with food and beverage at business events. Actually, that’s not quite true. I’m a lot obsessed.
And there’s a good reason for that. Food is one of the most tangible parts of the delegate experience. Long after people forget the name of the breakout room or the colour of the carpet, they remember whether they were hungry, over caffeinated, or desperately fighting a post lunch energy crash.
Which brings me neatly to this week’s fixation: bananas. Or more accurately, the total absence of them.
I raised this in a conversation last week with a group of venues while discussing how associations can deliver better delegate experiences. My point wasn’t really about bananas at all. It was about the lack of whole foods generally in conference catering.
Conference food has undoubtedly improved over the last decade. It’s lighter, more considered, and often more inclusive. But it is still, in many cases, heavily processed. We now have plenty of evidence showing that ultra processed food is not great for the brain, particularly when it comes to concentration, focus, and information retention. Not ideal when you are asking delegates to sit in sessions for six to eight hours.
Whole foods, on the other hand, help maintain energy levels and avoid sugar spikes. We have all experienced that painful post lunch slump where even the best speaker in the world is competing with biology.
So why no bananas?
They are affordable, familiar, easy to eat, naturally wrapped, and require no cutlery. Yet scan a typical conference refreshment table and an alarming number of miniature flapjacks, cookies and pastries and a growing number of their “protein” versions.
Part of it is logistics. Bananas ripen quickly and unpredictably. Too green and no one wants them. Too ripe and they bruise, look unappealing, and create waste issues by the end of the day.
The other is cost. Venues typically over-charge for their fruit provision, adding a standard F&B markup which much of the time doesn’t align with our own value proposition for fruit (I will forever think that bananas are about 25p each).
There’s also presentation. A bowl of apples looks neat and intentional. Bananas are somehow seen as messier or less professional. Some venues worry about peels being left behind or fingers becoming sticky, which says a lot about how we still prioritise aesthetics over actual experience.
Ironically, in trying to be healthier and more sophisticated, conference catering sometimes misses the simplest solutions, replacing whole foods with processed alternatives that look better on a buffet but do very little for delegate energy.
This is not a call for banana only conferences. It’s a reminder that small, thoughtful choices in catering have a disproportionate impact on how people feel, think, and engage at events. If we are serious about delegate experience, learning outcomes, and wellbeing, we need to look beyond trends and presentation and focus on what actually works.
And if that means a few slightly bruised bananas at the back of the room, I think we’ll survive. Alternatively we could always BYOB(anana).