Chicago Supermarket Breaks World Record for ‘Largest Fruit Display’

When it comes to the Guinness World Record for “Largest Fruit Display,” there is a new top banana. On Wednesday, June 8, a Jewel-Osco grocery store in Westmont, Illinois, and the fruit and vegetable producer and distributer Fresh Del Monte teamed up to earn a spot in the record books with a sprawling fruit display they appropriately called “Banana Bonanza.”

The display was built in honor of fruit and vegetable month in a parking lot in the Chicago suburb and, judging from local-news aerial footage, spanned at least two long tractor-trailer lengths and more than double the width. It contained 211,200 bananas weighing at a collective 70,365.9 pounds and took three days to construct, according to the Westmont Chamber of Commerce & Tourism Bureau.

So what happened to all of those bananas after Guinness, via an on-site adjudicator, certified the record? Don’t worry, none of it went to waste. Anyone who showed up to see the massive display in person was invited to help themselves to as many bunches as they wished — yes, for free; and yes, judging from news footage people did seem to be going … bananas. The rest was donated to a local food bank for broad distribution for what promised to be an impressive boon to potassium intake in the region.

In all, five trucks worth of bananas were donated to the Northern Illinois Food Bank, Jewel-Osco produce sales manager Scott Bennett told CBS News Chicago. “That’s one of our priorities to make sure we’re feeding the folks that need food,” he said.

The banana bounty significantly bested the previous “Largest Fruit Display” world record holder, Confederacao de Agricultura e Pecuaria do Brasil, which held the world record since July 2016, when it assembled 41,459.78 pounds of fruit in one place in Brazil, UPI notes. That display, which was also distributed for consumption after certifying its record, included 19 types of fruit, including, in addition to bananas, melons, mangoes, pineapples, passion fruit, papaya, two different kinds of grapes, strawberries, apples and more.

So, sure, the previous record holder gets points for variety, but for banana lovers, not to mention in terms of scale, this display probably had more appeal.

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