WILMINGTON, DE — Being the first port along the Delaware River from the coast gives the state-owned port of Wilmington, here, a competitive advantage.

Just four hours upriver from the Atlantic, Wilmington is among the top-ranked North American ports for fresh fruit imports and juice concentrate and has one of the larger dockside cold storage facilities in the U.S. Each year, more than 1.5 million tons of bananas, pineapples, grapes, deciduous fruit out of Chile and Argentina, and citrus from Morocco are offloaded at the port.

“We’re the banana capital of North America and the second-largest banana port in the world,” said Tom Keefer, deputy executive director of the Diamond State Port Corp.

Stacks of cargo containers beneath one of the port of Wilmington’s giant cranes. More bananas come into North America at the port than anywhere else in the country. (Photo by Chip Carter)The port is best-known for handling fresh fruit, juice and automobiles, but Keefer regularly sees an amazing array of cargo from his office window: steel, cattle, giant blades for wind turbines and, most recently, rocket boosters for private U.S. space programs that are coming from overseas.

An automated, web-based, real-time inventory management system lets customers keep track of product at the port from anywhere in the world and around the clock. That same system helps the facility consistently reach its goal of getting trucks on and off the terminal in 45 minutes, “and we track that,” he said.

“We’ve got excellent labor, the largest on-dock refrigerated warehouse capacity of any terminal in the United States and we’ve got two independent stevedoring companies. So from a price standpoint we can be very competitive. And because we are an employer and operate all our own warehouses, we can also be very competitive in the warehousing and storage and truck-loading areas,” Keefer said. “We have significant experience in cold treatment; several of our warehouses are certified by USDA for cold treatment. We’ve got great connectivity to the interstate system — less than half a mile out of the gate you can be going north and south via Interstate 495 and 95, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike takes you west. We tell our customers that when their trucks leave the port of Wilmington they don’t hit another traffic light until they’re coming off the interstate to deliver to market. And the Port is also served by two Class 1 railroads.”

Ongoing deepening of the Delaware River and looming expansion of the Panama Canal have the port of Wilmington focused on the future. The state is actively seeking partners for a public-private cooperative project to build a 125-acre container terminal “that would give us a unique opportunity in the general cargo liner shipping area where we don’t have a lot of exposure now, create a lot of jobs and have a significant impact on the region,” Keefer said.

“We’re looking for new opportunities wherever they may present themselves. We’re pretty versatile. We go after whatever is out there that we think fits our strong points,” Keefer said. “We’re doing the things we need to do to make ourselves as attractive a business partner as we can: we continue to work on our productivity, we continue to work to improve our facilities, we continue to work to attract new business and we continue to work on trying to find ways to add more value to the service we provide our customers.”