President L. Rafael Reif praised the Banana Lounge in his final address to the graduating class in May 2022. “The Banana Lounge is 'very MIT' in its charm and eccentricity,” he said, and listed some impressive (and MIT-like) reasons for its success, including that the students prototyped the lounge and tested it in real-world conditions, analyzed multiple fruits and the supply chain to minimize costs, tracked and adjusted the fruit's environmental conditions, secured funding from Feld, and “developed the cutting-edge concept of 'free coffee.'”
“More than 500,000 bananas have already been served in the lounge, two of which are mine,” said Reif, who added that he prefers mangoes.
In November 2022, admissions blogger Amber Velez, 24, declared the Banana Lounge the fourth-best place to sleep on campus, beating out Hayden Library and Barker Library, but losing out to the Course (x) Lounge (where x is any integer between 1 and 24), “empty classrooms after recitation,” and “9 a.m. classes.”
The lounge continues to be entirely student-run, but MIT provides a cleaning service. In 2018, students laced up their sneakers and ran to Yel-O-Glow, a giant banana-ripening facility in Chelsea, to pick up a full crate and take an Uber to campus. At one point, students bought bananas from MIT's dining hall, which in turn sourced them from Yel-O-Glow through a produce supplier. It was convenient, but the second layer of middleman led to significant blemishes (affecting 5-20% of bananas) and waste. But consumption has since increased, and they can now order them separately from Yel-O-Glow. Students email their orders three times a week by midnight, and by around 8am the next morning the company delivers a crate of 40 pounds, or 100 bananas, to Stata's loading dock. From there, students transport the pallets to the lounge, taking great care to minimize blemishes.
Ahrens says it was crucial to optimize the supply chain, which stretches 3,000 miles to Central America and takes weeks from harvest to the lounge. He points out that they focused on those last few days and miles. Their top priority is reliability, making sure students have access to bananas around the clock. They also aim to minimize waste, costs, and student labor and maximize quality while working around the constraints of the lounge's limited space and the rate at which bananas ripen (which are temperature sensitive).
In the Banana Lounge, tables are positioned to create ideal lighting for sitting crouched over the P-set, and chairs are positioned so you can always see other people's faces.
Malte Ahrens '17
The Banana Lounge team worked with experts from Del Monte, AgroAmerica and more, and Ahrens and Therese Mills ’21 even flew to Central America on a mission to track the banana supply chain, from planting, harvesting, cutting, cleaning, packing, shipping, ripening and delivery to the lounge. “But our biggest teacher was the necessity and the learning we did from failure along the way,” Ahrens says. They had to deal with a variety of challenges, including under-ripe and over-ripe bananas, too many or too few bananas, unexpected campus events, snowstorms, delivery delays, air conditioning failures and damage from the winter cold.
“We have amazing data,” says Ahrens. “Every delivery to date (594 deliveries) is logged with notes on quality, ripeness, company and country of origin. We also check the space on average three times a day and record data points like banana levels and how busy it is. This allows us to predict consumption at any given time with a fair degree of accuracy and track any recurring issues that we report back to Yell-O-Glow and the banana companies. For example, when we had an issue with bananas splitting, we alerted the banana company and were able to trace the issue back to when it occurred when unloading at the port.”
