It was formerly controlled by American businessman Carl Lindner Jr., whose majority ownership of the company ended when Chiquita Brands International exited a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 19 March 2002.

[3] Chiquita Brands International's history began in 1870,[5] when ship's captain Lorenzo Dow Baker purchased 160 bunches of bananas in Jamaica and resold them in Jersey City eleven days later.

In 1873, Central American railroad developer Minor C. Keith began to experiment with banana production in Costa Rica.

Nevertheless, well planned tourist trips concealed the brutal and corrupt reality that existed on United Fruit's plantations in Latin America.

In 1952, the government of Guatemala began expropriating unused United Fruit Company land to landless peasants.

[6][17][18] AMK owned the meatpacker John Morrell & Co..[19] Black took a controlling interest by outbidding two other conglomerates, Zapata Corporation and Textron.

[24] Fyffes manager Ernst Otto Stalinski alleged that Chiquita used a falsified arrest warrant in a kidnapping attempt, and he filed suit several times.

In 2004, 100% of Chiquita farms were certified compliant with the SA8000 labor standard and the company earned the "Corporate Citizen of the Americas Award" from a Honduran charity.

[6] In March 2014, Chiquita Brands International and Fyffes announced that their boards of directors had unanimously approved a merger agreement.

[29] The agreement would have created the largest banana company in the world[30] with projected annual revenues of US$4.6 billion and have been domiciled in Ireland but be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

[32] Reuters reported that the merger would create tax advantages deriving from being based in Ireland, similar to those enjoyed by Perrigo following its takeover of the Irish company Élan.

[36][37] Yet the North Carolina Economic Development board asserted that if the headquarters was moved away, the company would be due to return N.C. and local incentive money.

[39] The company's Fresh Express brand has approximately $1 billion of annual sales and a 40% market share in the United States.

Vocalist Patti Clayton was the original 1944 voice of Miss Chiquita, followed by Elsa Miranda, June Valli and Monica Lewis.

[47] On 3 May 1998, The Cincinnati Enquirer published an eighteen-page section, "Chiquita Secrets Revealed" by investigative reporters Michael Gallagher and Cameron McWhirter.

The section accused the company of mistreating workers on its Central American plantations, polluting the environment, allowing cocaine to be brought to Borneo on its ships, bribing foreign officials, evading foreign nations' laws on land ownership, forcibly preventing its workers from unionizing, and a host of other misdeeds.

"[54] In the 1990s and early 2000s, faced with an unstable political situation in Colombia, Chiquita and several other corporations including the Dole Food Company, Fresh Del Monte Produce and Hyundai Motor Corporation made payments to paramilitary organizations in the country, most notably the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

[57] On 14 March 2007, Chiquita Brands was fined $25 million as part of a settlement with the United States Justice Department for having ties to Colombian paramilitary groups.

Similar payments were also made to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as the National Liberation Army (ELN) from 1989 to 1997, both left-wing organizations.

Chiquita sued to prevent the United States government from releasing files about their illegal payments to Colombian left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups.

[62] On 7 December 2007, the 29th Specialized District Attorney's Office in Medellín, Colombia subpoenaed the Chiquita board to answer questions "concerning charges for conspiracy to commit an aggravated crime and financing illegal armed groups".

"[64] In 2013 and 2014, Chiquita spent $780,000 lobbying against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, hiring lobbyists from Covington and Burling, a high-powered white shoe law firm.

[65] On 24 July 2014, a US appeals court threw out a lawsuit against Chiquita by 4,000 Colombians alleging that the corporation was aiding the right-wing paramilitary group responsible for the deaths of family members.

[66][67] In 2016, Judge Kenneth Marra of the Southern District of Florida ruled in favor of allowing Colombians to sue former Chiquita Brand International executives for the company's funding of the outlawed right-wing paramilitary organization that murdered their family members.

The case is In Re: Chiquita Brands International, Inc., Alien Tort Statute and Shareholders Derivative Litigation (0:08-md-01916), presided by Judge Kenneth Marra.

[75] In May 2007, the French non-governmental organization (NGO) Peuples Solidaires (fr) publicly accused the Compañia Bananera Atlántica Limitada (COBAL), a Chiquita subsidiary, of knowingly violating "its workers' basic rights" and endangering their families' health and their own.

According to the charge, the banana firm carelessly exposed laborers at the Coyol plantation in Costa Rica to highly toxic pesticides on multiple occasions.

The Swiss magazine Beobachter[77] publicised severe labour rights issues on Ecuador's banana plantations, some of which supply Chiquita.

[78] Chiquita responded to the activism with changes in corporate management and new patterns of global competition, according to J. Gary Taylor and Patricia Scharlin.

[80] When approached for comment, Chiquita would neither confirm nor deny the allegations, but reportedly began an internal investigation, the results of which have not been made public.