J&K Fresh seeing strong business in 2024
J&K Fresh seeing strong business in 2024
For J&K Fresh, fresh produce is the essence of its business. The company specializes in offering customs brokerage services for importers of fresh produce, guiding them through the complex clearance process in partnership with various government agencies.
This process demands up-to-date knowledge of CBP border security, customs entry, agricultural quarantine, food and drug safety, including bioterrorism and food safety regulations, as well as coordination with inspection facilities and logistics providers.
Specializing in a specific area of trade allows the entire team to concentrate on the evolving requirements and regulations impacting produce, according to John Ercolani, vice president of operations for the Philadelphia-based company.
As of early May, the company had seen a large uptick in business and expect strong things to continue.
“The year has been good and we have our nose to the grindstone,” Ercolani said. “Chile has had some big arrivals in recent weeks, and the markets are very strong there and the fruit continues to move very efficiently. Everyone is anxious and awaiting the arrivals and we have the right folks on the ground in Philadelphia waiting to handle.”
Beyond traditional customs brokerage services, J&K Fresh also offers compliance advice, C-TPAT guidance, reconciliation, certified document imaging storage and data integration.
Its ultimate goal is do what’s best for importers by applying a personal touch.
“We have close to 80 employees now and we are very focused on representing fruit the best we can and engaging the importers with government and industry updates,” Ercolani said. “We also leverage a lot of the technology we built in-house (known as Freshlook) to help the supply chain.”
Although the company works in all the ports nationally, its home in Philadelphia is important because for import deals, the city is what Ercolani described as “the creator.”
“There’s a ton of institutional knowledge and knowhow, going back all the way to the years when the Chilean grape deal started here,” he said. “The infrastructure has grown up around imports. Originally, a lot of the warehouses around South Jersey and in Pennsylvania did domestic programs and started to dabble in import programs in the 80s and 90s, but then the infrastructure blew up around the Philadelphia region because of how attractive the Port was for imports.”
The presence of skilled service providers who understood how to manage the product, warehouses equipped with cold storage to accommodate the volume, repack facilities experienced in the nuances of properly packaging fruit, and terminals aware of the urgency of handling perishable cargo all played a vital role.
“The people are what makes Philadelphia — and the entire region including Wilmington as well — so special. It continues to be the largest banana operation and tropical operation in the country,” Ercolani said. “There are a lot of family businesses that have supported generations of families because of their knowledge and sense of urgency around what it takes to move these products.”
J&K Fresh will be celebrating the one-year anniversary of its office in Miami later this year, and the company has added a lot of technological advancements to its operations as it continues to grow.
“Things are moving along quite well and we continue to make investments in our technology to create any edge that we can to get the fruit where it needs to be,” Ercolani said. “We see consistent and steady growth as a company.”
