The Fyffes group has undergone almost exponential growth thanks to a profitable run between 1993 and 1998, more or less coinciding with the EU's new single market regime for bananas. 

It has no collective agreements with trade unions either in Ireland or in any of the countries in which it operates.  The only plantation it owned or managed directly was in the former British colony of Belize, but the company is reported to have sold off its interest.In late 2005 however, Fyffes took a 60% stake in a Brazilian fruit company which owns plantations.

Fyffes buys from Belize, Suriname, Jamaica, the Windward Islands, Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Panama, Ecuador, Honduras and the Canaries.

As well as acquiring over a dozen European ripening, distribution and marketing partnerships, including the largest cooperative in the Canary Islands, Fyffes entered a major venture with the Windward Island Banana Development and Exporting Company (WIBDECO) in 1995. It bought out Geest Bananas, which sold the majority of Windward bananas on the British market. Since the buy-out the Fyffes-WIBDECO joint venture leases ships from Noboa to ship Windwards fruit to the UK.

Until Fyffes sold its Honduran and Guatemalan interests to Dole in 1996, the company owned a 50% share in 9 farms in Izabal, Guatemala and marketed the Honduran bananas to Europe and the USA. Since then,exports from these two countries to Europe have almost completely ceased (the bananas are sold in North America).

Fyffes uses the fact that it owns almost no plantations as a way of relinquishing responsibility for conditions on those plantations; working and living conditions in the Belizean banana communities - in a country where Fyffes remains the sole exporter - are some of the worst in the region. In 2001, supporters of the Latin America Solidarity Centre (LASC) in Dublin mounted a picket on the Fyffes shareholders' AGM. LASC declared that workers in Belize had been sacked because they had joined a union. Fyffes did nothing despite their promise to protect worker's rights and hold their suppliers to account.

Two years earlier Fyffes had joined with government officials, plantation owners and civil society organizations in Belize to agree a partnership approach to the future of the industry. Since then the efforts of the workers to organise a trade union have been thwarted by intimidation and firings on farms in Belize. A number of cases for unfair dismissal were brought to court but have taken years to be judged. On a separate occasion, four union members were arbitrarily deported until it was pointed out that they were in fact Belizean citizens!  Most of the workers are immigrants from the neighbouring Central American countries - Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. As such, they are especially vulnerable to violations of their rights.

Some observers believe that the government is slow to implement its own worker protection laws, fearing Fyffes will take their business elsewhere, leaving the small country's economy in ruins.

Fyffes has a 'Code of Good Practice' which forms part of their contract with plantation owners. This, in theory, guarantees workers' rights, particularly freedom of association. However, in reality, Fyffes have not insisted that plantation owners respect the workers' human rights, which means that the Code of Practice has made no difference on the ground.

Fyffes has thrived financially in recent years by being light on its feet, acquiring and divesting itself of land, property and companies, and profiting in particular from a series of joint ventures in what was until 2006 a relatively remunerative EU market. While it has performed well as a dealer in property, it has arguably neglected its core business. It has been largely squeezed out of the UK market by the big price-cutting supermarket chains and it will not in future be able to capitalise on any advantages it may have had as a trader working with traditional ACP producers.

Fyffes appears to be interested in diversifying beyond its traditional EU home to the US market and in late 2005 invested in a strategic alliance with the Turbana Corporation, the marketing subsidiary of Colombia’s exporting company UNIBAN.

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Fyffes