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Melon Mania Keeps Port on the Ball

Posted on: Thursday, 22 December 2005, 09:00 CST

By Kurt D. Schultheis, The Bradenton Herald, Fla., The Bradenton Herald, Fla.

Dec. 22--PALMETTO -- It is a busy time of year for shippers of millions of Central American-raised melons that arrive through Port Manatee.

From November through May, Port Manatee tenants Del Monte Fresh Produce and WSI Green Terminals are hard at work, taking containers of melons off ships and putting them into trucks that deliver to grocery stores and wholesalers throughout the country.

The reason?

The fruit can't be grown domestically this time of year. So ports around the country funnel the product in from countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica, which both have summer season growing conditions right now.

Del Monte Fresh Produce Port Manager Brian Giulani and Green WSI Terminals President Melanie Fore said their companies bring in millions of melons through Port Manatee each winter.

In Del Monte's case, more than 100,000 cases or 1,700 pallets of melons are shipped to the port once a week. There are 56 boxes per pallet, with about 12 melons in each box. The fruit is transferred onto trucks by stevedores that Del Monte hires especially for the season. The fruit is distributed to wholesalers and consumers throughout the Southeast.

WSI of the Southeast, the other Port Manatee tenant that handles melons, just created a new division called WSI Green Terminals this winter for the start of this year's growing season, Fore said.

WSI is a stevedoring and terminal handler company that partnered with Norwegian-based Green Reefers, a company that owns the ships and has contracts with melon growers in Guatemala, Fore said.

"The synergies between our two companies allow us to help transport the product from Port Manatee into the marketplace," said Fore, who is also the vice president of WSI Southeast.

A busy time

After the growing season ends in mid-May, WSI goes back to handling other products like steel and wood. More than 70 percent of the company's business is unloading wood brought in from Chile, Fore said.

This is the third season that WSI has helped move honeydew, watermelons and canteloupes to trucks that head all over the country. WSI has about 45 people that help unload one shipment a week for 26 weeks. Fore estimates her crew helps to move more than 45,000 pallets of melons this time of year.

With about nine melons per box and 56 boxes on each pallet, that's roughly 22.7 million melons per growing season.

"It's certainly very busy right now here at the port," said Steve Tyndal, senior director of trade development and special projects. Fresh-fruit shipments make up $2 million of the anticipated $15 million in 2005-06 revenues for the port, Tyndal said.

Del Monte and WSI/Green Reefers contribute roughly a million dollars in revenue to the port annually.

"We expect about 40 vessel calls for both operations combined each season," Tyndal said. Each ship generates 350 to 400 truckloads per call.

"That gives you a feel for the volume and the labor issues associated with running an operation like that," Tyndal said.

And that makes this Del Monte's busiest time of the year.

"We do double the volume that we do the other six months of the year," Giulani said. "We have double the ships, double the product and double the amount of working hours."

The same is true for WSI. "It's a weekly service that creates more jobs here at the port," Fore said.

Shipments

Del Monte receives a Guatemalan ship once a week and will start receiving a Costa Rican ship about once a week starting in January. Plus, it receives a weekly shipment of pineapples and bananas year-round from Guatemala.

"All of our proprietary product for the Southeast is brought through Port Manatee," Giulani said.

The Coral Gables-headquartered company has three other ports in the U.S. that handle melons that are distributed to other parts of the country. Those ports are located in New Jersey, Texas and California.

The New Jersey and California ports handle just Costa Rican melons. Port Manatee is the only one of the four ports that handles product from both countries, Giulani said.

Guatemala's growing season runs from November to January, while Costa Rica's season runs January through May.

Del Monte, the port's second largest tenant with 150,000 square feet of occupied space at Port Manatee, receives domestic melons the rest of the year mostly from crops in Arizona and California. Portions of the fruit also come from Texas and Florida.

All of Del Monte's fruit that leaves Port Manatee has a Del Monte sticker on it and heads out to both retail and wholesale customers, Giulani said. "It's our product on our ships coming into our facility," Giulani said.

It takes about five days to unload a ship and send it on its way, Giulani said. The fruit is sold before it even hits the docks.

Half of Del Monte's business is retail and the other half is wholesale.

Del Monte is currently the second largest employer in Guatemala, Tyndal said.

"Agricola La Labor, which operates about 60,000 acres of melon farms in Guatemala, has a good relationship with Port Manatee," he said. "We are working to enhance that relationship by adding cold storage."

That in turn would strengthen the partnership, bring more produce to the port that could be placed in refrigerated warehouses and bring in more revenue.

Need for more space

But while Port Manatee has more refrigerated warehouse space than any other port in the Gulf of Mexico, Tyndal said the port could use more.

Port Manatee currently has 202,000 square feet of refrigerated warehouse space and could use an additional 150,000 to 200,000 square feet.

"Even with what we have, we find ourselves in a shortage of it," Tyndal said.

The more refrigerated space, the more attraction for companies bringing in more business to Port Manatee.

The problem is that it costs about $100 a square foot to construct refrigerated storage, Tyndal said. "That's why it's so difficult," he said. "We almost have to have a private or public partnership set up to build it."

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Bradenton Herald, Fla.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Bradenton Herald (Bradenton, Fla.)

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