If you spend any amount of time in the produce section of a grocery store, you are bound to run into fruit and vegetables with the colorful Dole label. The brand is one of the most recognizable in the industry, and it is the market leader in almost every product. It sells the most iceberg lettuce, celery, cauliflower and fruit cups in North America, as well as selling more than a third of all bananas we buy. But, this triumph of American industry has not always been a story of success. Dole’s beginnings are not the uplifting narrative of the scrappy entrepreneur conquering all of the odds and making it big. No, the history of Dole is enough to make you never want to eat fruit again. It is a story of military coups, destroyed government records and poisoning its own work force.
The Dole Food Company began as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1901. The founder, James Dole, was the cousin of the president of recently conquered Hawaii. The overthrow of the government was the result of a plot lead by a small group of wealthy businessmen on the island culminating in a show of force from American Marines surrounding the queen’s residence. Sanford Dole, James’ cousin, was one of the men involved in the coup and later helped to facilitate the annexation of Hawaii by the U.S. This act lowered tariffs that partially prohibited trade to the U.S. and made it possible for James Dole to make his budding pineapple business profitable.
While the Dole family completed its conquest of Hawaii, another business family conquered land of its own. The Vaccaro family made its name in America with its importation of bananas from Honduras. The business became so profitable that Joseph Vaccaro became known as the "Ice King" due to his ownership of the majority of ice factories in New Orleans that he used to cool his bananas. The company, known as Standard Fruit, was later bought by the company that would become Dole Food Company. There is no way anything could be off about this picture, right? Wrong. In 1903, the town hall of port city La Ceiba, Honduras, burned to the ground along with all of its official documents. With no land records to speak of, the Vaccaro family could acquire most of the banana plantations around the city and stop paying farmers to grow bananas on land they didn’t get. It’s from this confiscated land that Dole grew a banana empire.
In the years since its creation, it has not been an empire without controversy — primarily, its use of a pesticide called Nemagon. The effects on its workers who sprayed the drug included sterility, stillbirths, birth defects and various cancers — effects that were known by manufacturers and the government as early as the 1950s. It wasn’t until 1977, however, that workers started to become aware of these effects. In response, the EPA banned its use in the U.S., and companies such as Del Monte and Chiquita stopped using the substance. Dole, on the other hand, continued to use the proven carcinogen in favor of making profits and went so far as to attempt to sue Dow Chemical for breach of contract when they attempted to stop shipments of Nemagon. It wasn’t until a year later that Dole stopped using Nemagon, though some claim it was still in use in 1980.
The company has faced litigation numerous times with workers getting varying success. In cases where Dole won, it has been claimed that the company bribed witnesses to give false testimony. Dole is not a fruit basket of paradise, and its long, shady history would lead any fruit lover to go bananas.