Who ships citrus, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships citrus

San Joaquin Valley houses. Sunkist is a marketing cooperative whose member packinghouses are listed publicly by county.

Ask for the traffic or shipping manager at the packinghouse, not the grower. Fresh citrus moves through a packing and marketing operation that pools fruit from many growers, and that house tenders the truck. Some of these are large enough to run scheduled programmes to retail distribution centres, which means appointment discipline matters more than rate.

Where it hauls

California is the fresh citrus state and the San Joaquin Valley is where it packs: Fowler and Orange Cove in Fresno County, Exeter, Lindsay and Terra Bella in Tulare County, and Delano in Kern County. Navels, mandarins and lemons come off the same district and often the same houses. Texas grapefruit out of the Rio Grande Valley and Florida citrus are real but much smaller in fresh terms, and Florida's crop is heavily juice. The packinghouses to know:

How to open

If you want to sound like you have done this: ask what they do on a freeze. Cold nights in the valley stop picking and then release a backlog all at once, and the carriers who absorb that surge are the ones who keep the freight.

Qualifying questions

• What is the setpoint, and which fruit is it? Navels, mandarins, lemons and grapefruit do not all want the same temperature, and citrus is chill sensitive in a way apples are not. Get the commodity and the setpoint together, never one without the other.
• Has there been a freeze? A cold snap stops harvest and then dumps a backlog when it lifts. It also raises the risk of fruit damage that shows up at the receiver. Ask what the last week's weather did before you take a load out of the valley.
• How many boxes and what does it scale? Reported volumes use 80 pound box equivalents, so a legal load is somewhere near 550 boxes. Cartons, bags and bulk bins all scale differently. Confirm the pack and the gross weight.
• Is this a retail programme or spot? Programme freight to distribution centres runs on firm appointments with performance scored. Spot is faster and less forgiving on rate. Ask which one this load is, because it decides how much a late arrival costs you.
• Is it export fruit? A meaningful share of California citrus goes to Asia through the ports, and export fruit carries extra paperwork, registered packinghouse requirements and hard vessel cutoffs. Ask early, because a missed cutoff is not a late delivery, it is a missed boat.

When to call

October and November, before navels start moving. The season then runs to June, so a seat won at the start is eight months of freight rather than a load. Mid-season calls are quoting overflow, though a freeze week is the one moment mid-season when a packinghouse will genuinely take a new number.