Who ships tomatoes, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships tomatoes

Florida growers and packers. The western half of the country is supplied through the Nogales and Pharr crossings instead.

Ask for the packinghouse traffic desk. These are grower-packer-shippers, often family businesses several generations deep, and the packinghouse tenders the truck. They ship into retail and foodservice distribution across the entire eastern half of the country, so the lanes are long and the volume is steady through the winter.

Where it hauls

Two Florida clusters and two border crossings. Immokalee in Collier County is the winter centre; Palmetto and Ruskin in Manatee and Hillsborough counties run the autumn and spring shoulders, with Homestead adding a deep-winter district. West of the Mississippi the supply is largely Mexican, crossing at Nogales, Arizona and Pharr, Texas, where the freight becomes a domestic reefer load. The Florida growers and packers to know:

How to open

Mentioning that tomatoes are chill sensitive marks you out immediately. Plenty of carriers run them too cold and the damage does not appear until the receiver opens the box.

Qualifying questions

• What is the setpoint, and is it chill sensitive? Tomatoes suffer chilling injury below about 50 degrees and the damage shows up as poor colour and mealy texture days later at the receiver. Running them at lettuce temperature ruins them. Confirm the setpoint precisely.
• Mature green, vine ripe, or roma? Mature greens are picked hard and gassed to ripen; vine ripes are picked with colour and are far more fragile. Different handling, different transit tolerance. Ask which is on the trailer.
• How many boxes and what does it scale? Standard cartons run around 25 pounds. Get the count and the pallet pattern, and confirm the target gross, because tomato loads scale heavier than the box size suggests.
• Is this a repack or straight to the distribution centre? A lot of Florida fruit goes to repack facilities before retail. Those receivers run different hours and different appointment discipline from a retail distribution centre.
• Florida or a border crossing? It changes with the month and the market. The answer tells you whether you are quoting an eastern lane out of Immokalee or picking up a crossed load at Nogales or Pharr.

When to call

October and November, before the winter deal opens. The season then runs to about June, which is seven or eight months of steady eastbound and northbound freight from a single district. Calling in January means quoting overflow behind carriers who committed in the autumn.