All Things Banana

Banana and Banana-Flavored Cooking, Baking & Snacking Ingredients & Flavorings

Wondering how to add realistic banana flavor and aroma to recipes without using artificial flavoring? OliveNation offers a variety of ingredient options that make it easy to add the taste and aroma of this delicious tropical fruit to dishes, mixes, and beverages. From freeze-dried powdered banana to liquid flavorings and extracts made from natural flavors for true-to-product taste, our selection allows professional bakers, chefs, institutional food service, dry mix manufacturers, commercial brewers, and home chefs to get the end result they want out of their recipes. These delicious flavorings are all offered in a variety of sizes to meet differing needs from pantry staples to bulk orders for at-scale food production. Try our natural and pure banana ingredients today and add this delicious tropical taste to baked goods, beverages, frozen dairy, and so much more!

What exactly does banana taste like?

Did you know that there's an actual controversy over whether banana flavoring tastes like bananas or not? It's true! At one point in time a theory arose that proposed that artificial banana flavor was created to taste like the Gros Michel banana, a variety that is now so sparsely cultivated as to be nearly extinct, and that because of that, older formulations of artificial flavor taste like the more intensely-flavored Gros Michel and not the more common Cavendish variety people are now used to. The theory has been pretty much debunked, although it is true that the intensity of banana flavor and aroma is somewhat stronger in the Gros Michel. This is because that variety contains a high percentage of naturally-occurring isoamyl acetate, a compound which is also called "banana ester" because it is what makes bananas, and banana flavors, taste like... banana.