Disappearing Korean Bananas

I stumbled upon several posts about a clever way to sell bananas out of Korea. Below is an example post about it from “thingsyoudontknow1” on Instagram in May 2026.

In 2018, the South Korean grocery chain E-Mart introduced "Haru Hana Banana" — which translates to "One-a-Day Banana." Each pack contains five to seven bananas at staggered ripeness levels, ranging from fully yellow and ready to eat to bright green and several days from being ripe. The packaging is designed so consumers can eat one banana per day, with each successive banana reaching peak ripeness as the previous one is consumed.

Also in May 2026, this “genius idea” was hailed in an Instagram post by AsianFeed and articles in Upworthy.com and LinkedIn. A year earlier, more articles and Facebook posts, and so on. This seems to be a “viral comet” that comes back each year since 2018.

I wanted to go to the source: E-Mart and their shopping website SSG.com. There were no results for “Haru Hana Bananas” and all their banana offerings were normal bunches.

After some internet sleuthing, I found a link to the deactivated product page for Haruhana Bananas.

Curious that the picture shows all yellow bananas.

Of the 21,764 customer reviews and 488 uploaded photos, the most recent were in June 2021. Nothing after that, which implies they stopped selling this product five years ago.

Reading the reviews (translated into English), many customers said it was more expensive than regular bananas. Bananas release ethylene gas as they ripen so when they are all in a plastic container together, they all ripen much faster. Many customers received the product with all the bananas yellow and spotted already.

When they weren’t all yellow, customers would get 2 yellow & 4 green, or 4 yellow & 2 green, or sometimes 2 yellow & 2 green & 2 yellowish-green. This suggests that the person prepping the packs isn’t picking from six perfectly punctual piles. (Was it Peter Piper?)

One customer complained that the instructions say to eat the bananas from left to right, but their box had the greenest bananas in the middle. How confusing!

E-Mart proudly and loudly introduced the product in 2018 and then quietly killed it three years later. I think internet virality crashed into cold hard reality.

• This is an expensive, labor intensive way to sell bananas that probably makes the bananas spoil faster.

• Just because you have fewer bananas spoiling in your kitchen doesn’t mean there aren’t hundreds of unsold bananas rotting at the store.

• Think of all the non-compostable plastic containers used for this! At least rotted bananas are compostable.

You know what hasn’t shown any signs of decay in 8 years? The internet meme.