PORT OF WILMINGTON, DE — Paul Ross, managing director of East Coast operations at the port of Wilmington for California-based Dayka & Hackett Worldwide Produce Source, has spent 35 years traveling the world looking for the best produce on the planet.

“I’ve been to 70 different countries, many of them multiple times, and I’m going to make a point of getting to the ones that I haven’t been to before I retire,” he said.

In fact, Mr. Ross’s passport got so full he had to send it back to have more pages added. Instead, somehow his passport was accidentally destroyed and he got a letter back telling him to go get a new one. He did, “but this time they issued one with a lot more pages,” he laughed.

Dayka & Hackett is a grower, importer and shipper of fresh fruit. A truly vertically integrated farming, shipping and sales organization, Dayka & Hackett members include growers, packers, shippers and marketers. Products are sourced globally from growing areas like California, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Peru and Spain to meet the year-round requirements of the North American customer base.

Founder and managing members Tim Dayka and Ralph Hackett have a combined 35 years of experience in the produce industry and a highly successful track record of developing produce sources and marketing programs for the company’s growers.

While Dayka & Hackett is a grower, “We import a lot more than we grow. We import more than 8 million boxes of fruit a year.” Mr. Ross said.

Dayka & Hackett will ship more than 12 million cartons of fresh fruit this year, including table grapes, peaches, plums, nectarines, kiwifruit, apples, pears, citrus and mangos.

East Coast operations have been at the port of Wilmington since Dayka & Hackett was founded.

“I think the biggest advantage for an import company to be at the port is because you’re with the fruit. You’re on the phone with a customer, if they want to know something you can pop downstairs and look at the fruit and tell them from first-hand knowledge rather than just reading a report,” Mr. Ross said. “Also, the customers send birddogs a lot these days to look at their fruit. They come upstairs and request to, ‘Come and look at the fruit.’ I interact with customers more often and it is much more personal. I see it as a distinct advantage to have a sales office in the port. It’s also good because when we’re training new employees, we have an opportunity in a very easy way to show them how Dayka & Hackett does our QC and how the inspectors work at the tables, how the process works, how the ships come, along with many different things. You have an advantage being at the port. It’s easier and it’s more cost effective. If we don’t have to maintain QC staff all over the place, it’s more efficient. Another important advantage of being in port is we have the QC opportunity to selectively match each order to the available product.”

One thing Mr. Ross has learned from his travels is that what today is a specialty item in the United States is tomorrow a staple. He hopes U.S. retailers will learn some of the same lessons he has.

“Supermarket promotions are mostly built on histories rather than surges in crop productions. It’s very hard to get retailers to change,” Mr. Ross said. “European buyers have known for 30 years that the best eating grapes are grapes that have amber, some yellow color to them. But you can’t get a supermarket in the United States to buy grapes with any yellow — they prefer green as green as green. Why? Because they’ve done it that way forever and it’s easier for them to have uniformity in their specifications.”

Meanwhile, “mangoes are one of the fastest growing items in the supermarket and that’s reflective of the changing population and demographics in the U.S. — and it’s starting to cross over [into general consumption],” Mr. Ross said.

Which means as the United States changes, companies like Dayka & Hackett will become increasingly important players in the domestic market.

“We as a company are diligent and working harder and harder and harder” to continue to import items Americans want — and help expand their palates,” Mr. Ross said. “We’re all in it together.”