Who ships apples, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships apples

The two Washington districts. New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania have their own packers and much shorter lanes.

Ask for the traffic or transportation manager, and for the sales desk if the packer is small enough that one person does both. Washington packers are large, sophisticated and used to freight: many run scheduled programs to retail distribution centres and treat carrier performance as a scorecard. That cuts both ways. It is harder to get in and much harder to get thrown out.

Where it hauls

Two districts carry it. The Wenatchee Valley in Chelan and Douglas counties, with Wenatchee, East Wenatchee, Chelan and Quincy. The Yakima Valley to the south, with Yakima, Selah, Wapato, Grandview and Prosser. Both sit east of the Cascades and both ship east and south on long reefer lanes, because the population that eats the apples is three time zones away. New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania run real crops of their own, mostly for closer markets. The Washington packers to know:

How to open

The crop being down about 7% is worth knowing before you dial: fewer boxes means tighter allocation and a packer that is more careful about who it commits to, not less busy.

Qualifying questions

• What temperature, and is it a controlled-atmosphere load? Apples run cold, around 32 to 34 degrees depending on variety. Controlled atmosphere is a storage method, not a transport one, but fruit coming straight out of a CA room is sensitive to handling. Confirm the setpoint and whether they want continuous monitoring.
• How many boxes, and what does it scale? A standard load runs somewhere near a thousand 40-pound boxes. That is heavy enough to matter and the pallet configuration changes it. Get box count and target gross before you quote.
• Is this going to a distribution centre on a scheduled programme? Most Washington volume moves to retail distribution centres on appointments, with on-time performance scored. Ask what the appointment window is and what happens to a late truck, because that is the whole relationship.
• Bruising and load securement, who is responsible? Apples bruise and the claim shows up at the receiver days later. Confirm how the pallets are secured, whether airbags or load bars are expected, and who inspects at pickup.
• Are you shipping fresh-picked or out of storage? Early season is fresh-picked and frantic. From about December it is storage fruit on steady programmes. The two need different equipment availability and they price differently, so ask which one they are calling about.

When to call

Now, through harvest. Rooms are being filled between late August and November, and the programmes that draw them down run from January to the following summer. A carrier that proves itself on the harvest rush is the one that gets the steady winter freight, which is the better business of the two.