Teddy Georgallas, 41, has been a banana man his whole life.

Like most of the distributors in Hunts Point, Banana Distributors is a family business. His father and uncle started the company 50 years ago in East Harlem. The company moved to Hunts Point 10 years later, well before the market opened there in 1967, and to its present location in 1979.

Bananas are big business. Georgallas says he grosses $500,000 per week, roughly on par with his competitors American Banana, Top Banana, and Long Island Banana, among others.

Wholesale produce is an all-night business. The company is open from midnight to two in the afternoon. Today, Georgallas starts work at 6 a.m. But there were times he had to start work so early that he woke up yesterday.

Banana Distributors buys its bananas by the palate (a palate contains 48 boxes) and loads them onto trucks that hold 20 palates each. The company sells approximately 20 truckloads (consisting of 20 palates or 960 boxes) per week. With roughly 100 bananas in a 40-pound box, that works out to about 1.9 million bananas every week and just under 100 million bananas per year. Which is a lot of bananas.

Georgallas worked summers at the warehouse. He had hoped to become a schoolteacher, but "economics" called him back to the banana trade and he became a partner with his cousin and brother-in-law 18 years ago. Georgallas' daughter is too young to think about her career. But his brother-in-law Paul Rosenblatt has a son who is a senior in college. Rosenblatt hopes that his son will find another line of work. "Not that it's too hard, I'd just assume he do something else."

Most family businesses, he says, tend to slip in the third generation, and the banana business is no different. Still, wholesale produce is not for "upstarts." Outsiders, even those who buy an existing company, tend to fail. It's a business of relationships and customers are reluctant to change suppliers. Some have tried to break in "by giving the product away. But it's hard to make money that way."

If Rosenblatt's son doesn't take over, who will? In other cities, Rosenblatt says, growers like Bonita or Chiquita Banana have bought out the distributors. If that happens here, bananas may still flow into the Bronx, but it won't be Bronx men selling them. END

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Bananas

a brief history of the world's funniest fruit

Scholars believe that bananas were first harvested in Southeast Asia.

The first recorded western encounter with bananas dates back to Alexander the Great, who discovered the banana in 327 B.C. while conquering India.

Bananas were introduced in the western hemisphere in 1516 when Spaniards planted banana stocks the rich fertile soil of the Caribbean islands, where they still flourish today.

Bananas came to the United States in the ealry 1800s, when sailors began importing them from the Carribean.

Today, bananas are America's most popular fruit. None grown in the U.S., they are all imported.

The identity of the first person to slip on a banana peel remains a mystery.