New Zealand banana cultivars have potential as premium baby food product

1 December 2025 - A new PhD study is looking at Northland-grown bananas as first foods for weaning infants.  

PhD candidate Simone Frame (Ngāti Maniapoto) aims to help far north grower Austenz Ltd who is working on a baby food product made from New Zealand bananas. Austenz Ltd’s Toni-Nere Austen (Te Rawawa, Ngati Kahu, Ngati Hine) is also one of Simone’s PhD supervisors. 

Simone is supported in her studies by the Riddet Institute, a government Centre of Research Excellence hosted by Massey University in Palmerston North focusing on advanced food research.  

Simone’s work will investigate how the infant gut responds to specific prebiotic structures in New Zealand-grown bananas. Currently the only commercial bananas available are imported from overseas, and the market is dominated by one variety, cavendish. In Aotearoa a wide array of different banana cultivars are grown. 

Simone says she wants to be a part of research science that can be used to achieve Māori aspirations, and she is grateful her PhD project gives her the agency to do so. 

“I want to be able to do the sort of science that can make a real-world difference in my community,” Simone says.   

Another of Simone’s supervisors is the Bioeconomy Science Institute’s Dr Jane Mullaney (Ngāti Porou/Ngāti Raukawa), who says Simone’s study intends to support Māori achieving Māori aspirations.  

“It’s bridging the gap for Māori that haven’t got access to research resources and don’t know who to trust in this field. She is taking science and using her skills and knowledge to help Māori develop a new industry. 

“We want to use our science to benefit Māori aspirations, instead of the other way around, which has often been the case in the past when generational knowledge has been taken advantage of.” 

Dr Mullaney has been working alongside Austenz since 2019 after leading a banana programme with Trevor Mills and Laurie Te Nahu of Gisborne-based Tai Pukenga Ltd. The programme found that New Zealand had pockets of suitable climates for growing sub-tropical plants.  

“Simone’s hitting it at a time where there’s now enough bananas being grown to develop the industry further. She has also worked with Austenz and developed a good relationship; she intends to use science to answer their questions.” 

This is one of several recent Riddet Institute studies looking at the role of infant gut health in promoting better health outcomes later in life.  

Simone completed her master’s studies last year analysing the nutrient composition of an array of bananas grown in Northland and simulating how these nutrients would be fermented in the infant gut. 

Simone’s latest research will again involve the relationship between infant gut microbiota and the prebiotic structures grown in bananas. But this time she is researching the starch profiles of bananas grown at different times of the year.

She is also hoping to compare New Zealand-grown bananas with those harvested in Australia.   

The theory is that New Zealand’s cooler climate will produce the distinct starch profiles they are targeting and be different to bananas grown in tropical zones in the world. 

Dr Mullaney explains that bananas have no set harvest time and will keep growing and fruiting as long as temperatures are above 14 degrees Celsius. They hibernate below that temperature and resume when its warmer again. 

“Bananas are ready when they are ready. There can be an autumn or a late summer harvest, or if a spring cold snap damages the buddling fruit inside a stem, they can be mis formed, resulting in a condition known as ‘November dump’.” 

The planting time can also contribute to the fruiting time, and different cultivars have different starch profiles. 

“When babies transition to solid food, bananas are a good weaning food,” Dr Mullaney says. “We think New Zealand bananas have characteristics that make them superior to those grown overseas to make them more nutritious, based on our climate and their slower growing.”  

For her PhD, Simone will be monitoring specific climate conditions where New Zealand growers are cultivating banana plants, to better understand how New Zealand growing conditions impact prebiotic components. From this the scientists and growers can determine which banana variety is best suited to baby food.