Who ships strawberries, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships strawberries

Both seasons on one list. The California Strawberry Commission alone brings together more than 400 growers, shippers and processors.

Ask for the cooler or the traffic desk. Berries move through grower-shippers who pick, cool and sell, and the cooler tenders the truck because it is the cooler that knows what came out of the field that morning. Receivers are retail distribution centres, and they do not choose the carrier. On this freight the shipper decides, quickly, and often the day of.

Where it hauls

The Florida winter crop is concentrated to an unusual degree: Plant City, Dover and Lithia in eastern Hillsborough County, with a spillover into Manatee County, supported by more than 15,000 acres. That is the whole winter supply for most of the country. California is the far larger producer overall, running from Watsonville and Salinas in the north down to Santa Maria, Oxnard and Ventura, but its season starts as Florida's ends. The shippers to know across both:

How to open

The line that proves you understand it: "What do you do when Valentine's falls midweek?" Holiday pull is the single largest stress on this season and every cooler has an opinion about it.

Qualifying questions

• How fast does it have to move? Faster than almost anything else you haul. Berries are picked, cooled and loaded the same day, and shelf life is days. A truck that sits is a claim. Confirm the delivery appointment before you accept, not after.
• What is the setpoint, and is it forced-air cooled? Strawberries run just above freezing, around 33 to 34 degrees, and they are usually forced-air cooled before loading. Ask whether cooling is complete at pickup, because loading warm fruit into a cold trailer does not fix it.
• Is this a holiday pull? Valentine's Day is the single biggest demand event of the Florida season and it drags volume forward hard. Ask which week they are building for, because the rate and the urgency both change around it.
• Who inspects, and what happens on a temperature exception? Receivers on berries inspect closely and reject readily. Find out who inspects, what the tolerance is, and whether they want a download or a continuous monitor, before the load rather than during the argument.
• Florida or California right now? It flips around March. Asking it this way tells them you know the season swings coast to coast, and it tells you whether you are quoting a short eastern lane or a long western one.

When to call

November and December, before the Florida deal really opens. February and March are peak and there is no time to onboard anybody then. The other window is late February, calling California ahead of its spring start, when the origin is about to swing 2,500 miles west and every winter lane goes quiet at once.