As you looked west out on the horizon of the Pacific Ocean from the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in late February, there was quite a backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded — and some of them had mangos.

Larry Nienkerk, manager of Splendid Products LLC in Burlingame, CA, said the well-publicized contract dispute between West Coast ports and the union representing longshore workers “had a terrible impact on Peruvian mangos.”

He said some fruit waited so long to be unloaded that it resulted in as much as six weeks from field to the consumer’s refrigerator. Such fruit can cause marketing problems and it resulted in an inconsistent market price with older fruit competing against newer arrivals. Though the two sides reached a tentative agreement on Feb. 20, the backlog of ships from the alleged worker slowdown, as well as a closing of the ports during some holidays, might not be cleaned up until the middle of March or later. Nienkerk expects older fruit to be moved through the pipeline quickly precisely because handlers and retailers know it has limited shelf life.

By the middle of March, he expects most of the Peruvian fruit to be gone and mango supplies from Mexico will start to increase.

“Throughout March, I expect the volume (from Mexico) to gradually increase and turn into heavy volume by the first or second week of April,” he said.

The longtime mango importer predicted that volume will then take off and “there will be great opportunities for (retail) promotions throughout the summer.”

As far as Splendid is concerned, Nienkerk expects to have strong volume throughout the season from many different Mexican growing regions. His company is typically one of the volume leaders at the end of the summer when the crop moves to Los Mochis, Mexico’s northernmost mango production area. But Nienkerk said Splendid will have strong volume throughout the season.

He did express a bit of hesitation around the mango industry’s current effort at ripening fruit and offering softer at retail. The National Mango Board sponsored two webinars last year on ripening along the supply chain, and a retail-focused seminar on the subject is scheduled in Long Beach for late March. “I don’t want to be a naysayer on the subject,” said Nienkerk, “but it does concern me.”

Nienkerk is worried that pre-conditioning fruit to a ripened status when it gets to the display table could result in more shrink for the retailer.

He said ripened mangos sell well in Europe but the retail culture there frowns upon consumers handling the fruit themselves. Typically, in supermarkets or farmers’ markets for that matter, shoppers point to what they want and an employee picks it up and bags. That is not the protocol in the United States. Nienkerk is concerned that a soft piece of fruit could be over-handled, leading to poorer eating quality at home and a lot of shrink on the produce shelf.

In the long run, he sees the effort as valuable but he believes it is going to take a lot of consumer education to get the general population handling ripe fruit properly at the retail level.

“I think this is going to take a very long process of education to make it work,” Nienkerk said.