Time is ripe to import produce to Houston
Sick of your commute? Consider that of the grape.
The green grapes enjoyed last week by diners at the Houstonian Hotel were grown on the sunny hills of Chile, then harvested, driven to the Pacific coast and packed into a white refrigerated shipping container known as a reefer. Then the ship headed north, to the United States.
But it didn’t stop in Houston. Instead, it bypassed Gulf ports entirely and sailed to the Port of Philadelphia. The grapes then turned around and headed south to Houston by truck, a 1,600-mile drive that can take as long as three days.
The runaround means that imported produce, which accounts for more than half of the fresh fruits Americans eat, is often older by the time it reaches the table in Houston than in the Northeast.
That is changing. In response to demand from Southern fruit
and vegetable importers, the Department of Agriculture updated its rules in 2019 to make it easier for ports outside the Northeast to receive organic produce. That, coupled with growing investment in Houston facilities that can store and treat imported produce, may soon give Texans access to fresher, cheaper produce — including grapes.
“It’d be a good thing for the grapes to come in through Houston,” said Brent Erenwert, chief executive of fruit and vegetable distributor Brothers Produce, which was preparing to deliver the grapes to restaurants and hotels.
While the Port of Philadelphia has a storied legacy of importing foods that stretches back to the Colonial era, Houston’s port has long focused on the oil and petrochemical industries. It still lacks the specialized facilities and federal programs needed to import similar volumes of fruits and vegetables, which require special screening to prevent invasive pests and diseases from sneaking into the States.
In 2018, more than six times the volume of fruit and nuts was imported to the Port of Philadelphia than to the Port of Houston, according to the Journal of Commerce.
But the time is ripe to ship fruits direct to Houston.
Going to grape lengths
Roughly a decade ago, Ricardo Arias received a call about grapes.
Arias had just begun overseeing trade development for the Port of Houston. That included upping the amount of produce shipped through the port.
So when a major grocer expressed interest over the phone in importing grapes to the port, Arias was happy to help. That’s when he began to understand the challenges.
There are two primary ways to prevent pests from surviving a trip into the United States. The most common is to fumigate shipments with methyl bromide, a poisonous gas that kills bugs. (It also depletes the ozone layer, which is why the government restricts its use for
most things other than importing and exporting produce.)
The port had plenty of fumigation — even marble slabs can require treatment to make sure no animals are piggybacking in the wood-packing material. But grapes, unlike a marble slab, cannot be exposed to the heat of a Houston summer. Arias quickly realized the port needed fumigation in a temperature-controlled environment.
So he reached out to a freezer company with warehouses near the port and persuaded it to allow fumigation there. Produce is placed in a small room that is slowly raised to 70 degrees then pumped full of methyl bromide for up to 24 hours. (Ever see brown spots on your limes? That’s because temperatures rose too fast, causing their skins to bead with moisture, which reacted with the methyl bromide and scarred the rinds.)
That was one problem solved, although Arias admitted, “Fumigation is limited and may create a little bit of a bottleneck.” Grapes can now come into the Port of Houston — just in limited amounts. There are two federally approved inspection stations in cold storage facilities, and a bid will soon open for a third.
Organic grapes, on the other hand, face a separate set of hurdles. Methyl bromide is decidedly nonorganic, so organic produce is often cold-treated, subjecting it to near-freezing temperatures for as much as two or three weeks — long and cold enough so any larva, egg or pest in the fruit dies of hypothermia. That baby medfly’s dead body may still be in your orange when you eat it, but it won’t cause devastation to Texas citrus crops.
Produce can be cold treated in shipping containers, slowly killing bugs as they travel to the U.S. But what if the trip isn’t long enough for treatment to be completed? Or a shipping container loses power long enough for the temperature to rise by a few degrees?
Cold comfort
Only a few ports, including the one in Philadelphia, can handle such situations. When the Department of Agriculture first established cold treatment regulations, it limited cold treatment facilities to areas north of 39 degrees latitude and east of 104 degrees longitude — in other words, the Northeast. The geographic restriction was meant as an extra precaution — if things did not go right and invasive fruit flies survived their journey, the inimical winter would kill them off. Houston was just too hospitable to pestilent critters.
So while Northern ports developed the infrastructure to continue cold treatment after a shipment arrived, trouble could ensue when fresh food that has not completed its cold treatment shows up at the Port of Houston. It has to be fumigated — losing the premium it could have fetched as organic produce — or it’s turned away.
To avoid the risk, many distributors send their shipments first to the Port of Cartagena in Colombia, where they sit for weeks completing treatment before heading to Houston — adding to the age of the fruits and vegetables.
But the 2019 update to the Department of Agriculture’s rules means Houston, too, will soon be able to complete in-transit cold treatment. Once the program is in place, a process that could take up to two years, Arias hopes more organic food will be shipped directly to Houston, leading to fresher, more abundant organic options throughout Texas and spurring a building boom to accommodate the bounty.
“What I can tell you is blueberry growers in South America are very excited,” he said.
Group chill
More fresh foods will mean greater demand for places such as Produce Row. Less than 10 miles north of Hobby Airport and west of the Port of Houston, the group of temperature-controlled warehouses receives fruits and vegetables by land, sea and air. Brothers Produce owns 240,000 square feet spread throughout six buildings in the park, and forklifts beep and the intercom blares on dock, which is kept at 34 degrees.
More fresh food will mean more demand for such specialized space, where fruits and vegetables can be stored in separate rooms, depending on their needs. Some are grouped by pH, (“The only thing that can sit near citrus is cabbage and melon, or else the acidity causes it to mold”), others by temperature (“You want to keep these berries almost in a freezing spot”).
Some fruits are grouped together by stage of ripeness. Erenwert, the Brothers Produce chief executive, walked into a warm room filled with slightly green tomatoes, which needed to ripen before delivery.
It smelled sweet and a little pungent, like the kitchen of a pizza shop.
“What you smell is the gas that the fruit’s putting off,” he said. Ethylene gas is a ripening hormone naturally released by many fruits; by grouping the tomatoes together in an enclosed space, Erenwert had increased the concentration of ethylene in the air, egging the tomatoes to ripen even faster than they would naturally.
The business, which provides produce to grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, cruise ships and schools, has grown dramatically over the years, increasing its space in Houston alone 16-fold since 1998.
He was not the only business owner to see an opportunity in refrigerated logistics. The owner of produce company Pro Citrus Network also opened a cold storage and distribution company, Foremost Fresh Direct, after an influx of calls asking to use its temperature-controlled space. Foremost Fresh Direct is building a 70,000square-foot refrigerated facility in Baytown for customers to store, repackage and sort through temperature-sensitive products.
“There’s just really not enough refrigerated space for how much people want to bring into Houston,” said Jacquie Ediger, Foremost Fresh Direct’s executive vice president. She noted that every year it gets easier to ship produce into the Port of Houston.
And in a world coached by Amazon to expect the world’s consumer goods at their fingertips, the need for a refrigerated supply chain has grown. Customers expect a wider variety of produce; startups are offering to mail fresh foods, such as prepped meals and cold-pressed cleanses. The number of unique products, known in the retail world as a stock keeping unit or SKU, has grown exponentially, and every temperature-sensitive SKU needs a way to arrive fresh.
Erenwert looked at the stacks of produce surrounding him with something bordering awe.
“It used to be we had iceberg lettuce,” he said. “Now we have five kinds of lettuce, and that goes for all fruits and vegetables. The world keeps growing, adding SKUs.”