If you have driven around Cairns for more than a week, you have passed one. A small trailer parked up on a verge, stacked with bananas, a price written on a sign, an honesty box or a card reader, and nobody watching you.
Visitors find this genuinely startling. Locals stopped noticing years ago. Both reactions are worth examining, because the story behind them is better than “cheap fruit”.
How they work
You pull over, you take what you want, you pay by cash or card. That is it. There is no attendant. The whole model runs on the assumption that people will pay, and it has scaled well enough to suggest that assumption mostly holds.
Just Bananas is the operator behind them. Co-owner Tony Trafford told Cairns Local News in August 2026 that the business started in Cairns about five years ago with a single trailer. It now runs 13 around Cairns, plus 11 in Ipswich and 14 in Logan, with discussions underway with Brisbane City Council about trialling six more.
From one trailer to 38 across three regions in five years, on a business model where the customer decides whether to pay. That is the part we find remarkable.
The bit that makes it more than a novelty
Two details lift this above roadside-fruit-stall curiosity.
The first is what is in the trailers. The business buys fruit that might otherwise go to waste. Far North Queensland grows an enormous volume of bananas, and a lot of perfectly good fruit gets rejected on cosmetic grounds before it ever reaches a supermarket. Trailers like these are one of the few routes that fruit has to an actual eater.
The second is the crates. They use returnable foldable crates that go back to the farms, rather than disposable cardboard boxes. That is a small operational decision that quietly removes a lot of packaging from a high volume business.
The business has also taken part in Impact10x, a program run by James Cook University and Mindesigns with Queensland Government support. Mandarins are being trialled alongside the bananas.
Where to find one
Here is where we have to be honest rather than helpful: the trailers move. Publishing a fixed list of locations would be wrong within a month, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
What we can say is that they turn up on main roads and busy verges around the Cairns suburbs, and that if you are driving between the city and the northern beaches, or out towards the Tablelands, you will pass one without trying. Check current locations and prices with the operator if you want certainty.
Why it is worth stopping
Partly the price. Mostly because it is one of the small things that tells you where you are. You do not get honesty box banana trailers in a city that does not grow bananas, and you do not get them anywhere people cannot be trusted with them.
If you are collecting that sort of thing, Rusty’s Markets on a Saturday morning is the full version of the same idea, and the waterfall road trip up onto the Tablelands runs past a lot of farm gate stops worth pulling into.
Source: Cairns Local News, 21 August 2026. Trailer numbers and locations as at that reporting, and they change.
Header photo: Katie Purling. Courtesy of Tourism and Events Queensland.
