Dole plc

• 1. Introduction

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  Dole plc is an Irish-American farming company with 38,500 full-time and seasonal employees. Together they supply some 300 products to customers in 75 countries. In 2021 the company reported revenues of $6.5 billion.

  Most people meet it as a sticker on a banana or a label on a bag of salad. Few ask why a single name covers so many different businesses, or where that name came from. The answers run across several continents and well over a century of deals, rivalries and lawsuits. They also run through a documentary film that ended up in a courtroom.

  There is one more question that every grower of fresh food must face. How do you prove that something grown in an open field is safe to eat? This documentary follows the company through all of these threads.

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• 2. Pineapple Empire

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  In 1851, Amos Starr Cooke and Samuel Northrup Castle founded Castle & Cooke in Hawaii, a sugar and logistics business. It would later become the parent of the pineapple company that gave Dole its name.

  In 1899, the industrialist James Dole moved to Hawaii. His cousin Sanford B. Dole had helped overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893 and became the governor of Hawaii in 1898. In 1901, two years after arriving, James formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Its first shipment of canned pineapple went out in 1903.

  Those first cans of 1903 carried no brand of their own. They often took on the names of the distributors who sold them. Pineapple was still relatively unknown in the early 20th century, so James Dole and other growers bought magazine advertising. The company now describes this as one of the first nationwide advertising campaigns in the United States.

  The Ginaca Machine, created in 1911, made canning pineapple commercially viable. In 1922, Dole bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai and turned it into the largest pineapple plantation in the world. That same year, Castle & Cooke acquired 33% of the company through a lease agreement.

  In 1927, the company began stamping its cans with the Dole name, along with numbers that indicated the grade. A distributor might change the label, but the stamp kept the name visible. By the end of the 1920s, the company was growing more than 75% of the world's pineapples.

  The Great Depression ended that run of confidence. The Hawaiian Pineapple Company struggled to stay financially sound, and Castle & Cooke took control in 1932. The business was renamed the Dole Company, and in 1961 it became a subsidiary of Castle & Cooke. Two years later, it was opening plantations and canneries in the Philippines and Thailand. Its parent, meanwhile, would prove to have an appetite for other fruit companies.

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• 3. Banana Fortunes

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  Salvador D'Antoni and the Vaccaro brothers had been shipping bananas, coconuts and other goods since 1899. In 1906, the four men organized their trade as Vaccaro Brothers and Company.

  La Ceiba, in Honduras, became the firm's headquarters. There it bought housing and cargo ships and built rail and telephone lines at its plantations. Its rapid growth has been attributed to the destruction of property records in the early 20th century. With the support of the Honduran government, the firm took control of large swaths of land.

  In 1924, the business went public as the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company. During the 1920s, Panama disease was destroying crops of the Gros Michel banana. Standard Fruit searched for other varieties and settled on the Cavendish. That choice helped it become the largest banana producer in the world by the 1960s.

  In 1968, Standard Fruit merged with Castle & Cooke. A banana leader and a pineapple company now answered to the same parent.

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• 4. Murdock's Gamble

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  A decade after that merger, Castle & Cooke acquired Bud Antle Inc., a California vegetable company. The parent then began to struggle financially.

  In 1985, the billionaire David H. Murdock bought Castle & Cooke. He began adding food companies to the fold. Between 1985 and 1990, the company bought several West Coast fruit and nut producers and distributors. These included Bonner Packing Company in California and Wells and Wade Fruit Company in Washington.

  The island of Lanai also passed into the control of Castle & Cooke in 1985. Hawaii's pineapple business was shrinking by then, as high labor and land costs took their toll through the 1980s. In 1992, Dole phased out its pineapple operations on Lanai. In 1996, Murdock separated Dole from Castle & Cooke, which became a real estate development company.

  The early 2000s brought Dole close to bankruptcy. Murdock rescued the company, which had been publicly traded, and in 2003 took it private. In 2009, he took it public again, raising $446 million.

  In 2012, Dole agreed to sell its packaged food division and its Asian fresh produce operations to the Japanese firm Itochu for $1.7 billion. The sale concluded in April 2013. The Dole brand stayed on some packaged foods worldwide, and on fresh produce in Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The Dole Food Company had no business involvement in those products. In August 2013, Murdock reacquired Dole as a private company, at a valuation of $1.6 billion.

  Investors then sued Murdock and the Dole Food Company President, Michael Carter. They argued the two had undervalued the company during the Itochu deal. In 2015, a judge in Delaware ordered the pair to pay shareholders $148 million for intentionally lowering the value of Dole stock before the buyout.

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• 5. Courts and Cameras

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  In 2003, a court in Managua, Nicaragua, ordered Dole, Shell and the Dow Chemical Company to pay banana workers $489.4 million. The case concerned the pesticide DBCP. The companies declined to pay.

  In 2007, a California judge awarded $2.3 million to Nicaraguan banana workers who had sued Dole over its use of DBCP. That ruling was overturned in 2010. Another judge noted a lack of evidence connecting the workers to Dole plantations. The judge also cited fraud committed by the plaintiffs' lawyers.

  In 2009, families of banana workers in Colombia sued the company. They alleged it had bankrolled militias that killed thousands of Colombians, including trade union organizers. The suit was dismissed with prejudice the following year.

  The Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten made a documentary about the California lawsuit, titled Bananas! Dole responded by suing him for defamation. Dole lost and was ordered to pay the filmmakers SEK 1,400,000. Gertten then made a follow-up about the defamation fight, Big Boys Gone Bananas!, which premiered in 2012.

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• 6. The Irish Side

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  Charles McCann ran a fish, fruit and vegetable market in Ireland in the 1850s. The company traces part of its family tree to that market.

  In 1902, the McCanns opened a store in Dundalk. In the 1950s, they began consolidating with other Irish firms, creating United Fruit Importers and then Fruit Importers of Ireland. The latter became a publicly traded company. In 1986, Fruit Importers of Ireland bought Fyffes from Chiquita.

  In 2006, Total Produce was spun off from Fyffes as a fresh fruit and vegetable business, separate from the tropical fruit side. At its start it was one of the largest produce companies in Europe. It led the market in Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and the Czech Republic. In 2007, it expanded into the United Kingdom by buying the British firm Redbridge Holdings for 11.75 million pounds.

  In 2018, Total Produce bought a 45% stake in the Dole Food Company. In 2021, the two merged to form Dole plc. The new company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2021. Its world headquarters sit in Dublin, with US headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  As of 2021, Rory Byrne is chief executive, and Johan Lindén is chief operating officer. The chairman is Carl McCann.

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• 7. Ships, Stickers, Mascots

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  Dole covers five continents with 109,000 acres of its own farmland. It also runs five manufacturing plants, 75 packing houses and 160 distribution centers. It is vertically integrated, meaning it owns plantations in Central America rather than only buying from them.

  The company operates 13 cargo vessels. Its container ships carry refrigerated containers and use their own cranes, so they do not depend on port infrastructure. The line also exports third-party goods to Central America.

  In 2020, the Fresh Fruit segment, built on bananas and pineapples, brought in about 35% of revenues. Fresh Vegetables supplied 29%. The two Diversified Fresh Produce segments together made up 37%.

  As of 2022, Dole licenses characters from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars for fruits and vegetables, including stickers on bananas. The goal is to encourage children to eat produce. Cobranded recipes feature Disney films such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Frozen II. Separately, PepsiCo sells bottled fruit beverages under the Dole brand.

  The Guinness Book of World Records (2007) lists the pineapple maze at the Dole Plantation on Oahu, Hawaii, as the world's largest maze. The company's mascot is Bobby Banana, an anthropomorphic banana who appears in children's comics and games.

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• 8. Food Safety

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  In California, Dole is a certified member of the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement. That group brings together food scientists, safety experts, government, farmers, shippers and processors. Dole follows Good Agricultural Practices on its own farms and those of contract growers.

  It also runs SafetyChain, a cellphone-based system that records the region, grower and lot number for each crop. It flags non-compliance immediately. The need for such systems was learned the hard way.

  In 2005, Minnesota Department of Health officials found E. coli O157:H7 in Dole bagged lettuce. The outbreak infected 25 people in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oregon. The next year, an E. coli outbreak sickened more than 200 people and killed three. It was traced to a California spinach processor that packed under the Dole brand, and Dole recalled the spinach. Dole personnel and the California agreement say this 2006 outbreak led the produce industry to harmonize stricter farm and handling practices.

  In 2012, Dole recalled its Seven Lettuces salads after New York health officials found salmonella in random testing. That year it also issued two recalls of bagged salads for Listeria monocytogenes. Another listeria recall followed in 2014. In 2015, Dole recalled bagged spinach for salmonella after testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration at a plant in Springfield, Ohio.

  In 2016, an outbreak of listeriosis tied to the Springfield plant hospitalized 33 people and killed four. The plant closed for four months that year. Later reporting revealed that Dole had known about the listeria contamination in July 2014, more than a year before the closure. The United States Department of Justice opened a criminal probe, and Dole settled two civil lawsuits in 2017.

  In December 2021, Dole recalled 180 varieties of packaged salad over possible listeria contamination. It closed packaging facilities in Yuma, Arizona, and Bessemer City, North Carolina, to sanitize them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated after two people died and 17 became ill.

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