What is banana water?

My dad grows bananas, and I've spent the last year learning why almost nobody sells this stuff. Here's the plain version.

Written by the founder of Ba's Nanas. Last updated 20 September 2026.

Why bananas are so hard to turn into a drink

Squeeze an orange and juice comes out. Squeeze a banana and you get a handful of paste.

That's the whole problem, and it's the reason your grocery store has forty juices on the shelf and none of them are banana. Bananas are around 20 to 25 percent starch and carbohydrate by weight, with much less free water than citrus or apples. Press one and the starch binds everything into a purée that won't separate. There's no juice to pour off.

Getting an actual liquid out of a banana takes an enzymatic step. Food-grade enzymes — usually amylase to break down the starch and pectinase to break down the cell walls — are mixed into the mash and given time to work. The starch chains come apart, the pulp loosens its grip on the water inside, and the mixture thins enough to be pressed and filtered. What comes through is banana water.

The enzymes aren't an ingredient in the finished drink. They're a processing aid that gets deactivated by heat and filtered out with the pulp, which is why a bottle can still say "bananas" and nothing else and be telling the truth.

Banana water, banana juice, banana milk, banana tea

These get used interchangeably online and they shouldn't be. They're four different drinks.

"Banana water" and "banana juice" are mostly a labelling choice. Brands lean toward water because it signals thin and hydrating rather than thick and sugary, and because juice has picked up a reputation it can't easily shake.

Banana tea is the one people confuse most, probably because of the boiled-banana sleep videos. That's a home remedy, not a product, and hot water pulls far less out of a banana than an enzymatic press does.

What it tastes like

Lighter than people expect. The flavour reads as banana but without the heaviness of a smoothie — closer to a pear or a mild melon, with a clean finish. It isn't thick and it doesn't coat your mouth.

Colour is the part that surprises people. Good banana water often comes out pale pink or amber rather than white, because the compounds in the fruit oxidise on contact with air. It's the same browning you see in a cut banana on the counter, and it isn't a sign that anything is wrong.

How to read a banana water label

The category is young enough that the label does most of the work of telling good from mediocre. Four things worth checking:

• The ingredient list. If it says bananas, that's it. If sugar, cane juice or "natural flavours" appear, you're holding a banana-flavoured drink, which is a different product.
• Added sugar on the nutrition panel. Bananas bring their own sugar, so total sugar won't be zero. Added sugar should be.
• From concentrate or not. Concentrate means the water was boiled off and put back later. It's cheaper and it costs you aroma.
• Where the fruit came from. Most brands don't say. The ones sourcing from a specific farm usually mention it, because it's the expensive way to do it.

Why ours exists at all

My dad has been an entrepreneur his whole life, and growing fruit is his passion. The farm doesn't use chemicals, so a lot of what comes off it is spotted, curved, undersized — fine to eat, impossible to sell. Grocery buyers want uniform yellow.

Americans throw away roughly five billion bananas a year, according to the food waste non-profit ReFED, and cosmetic rejection is a large part of that. My dad also runs an environmental science company that turns fruit waste into organic fertilizer, so the instinct to get more value out of produce rather than watch it rot has been in the house my whole life.

Banana water is what happens when you apply that instinct to the pile of fruit nobody will buy. The fruit that couldn't be sold gets a second life, and it keeps for over a year at room temperature without a preservative, because the process is enough on its own.

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