J&K Fresh sees value in Philadelphia ports

For J&K Fresh, produce is not just part of its business, it is its business.

The company specializes in providing custom brokerage services to importers of fresh produce, working with various government agencies assisting produce importers in navigating through the multi-layered clearance process.

This process requires knowledge of CBP border security, customs entry, agriculture quarantine, food and drug including bioterrorism and food safety; and coordination with the inspection facilities and logistic providers.

“Specializing in one area of trade allows the entire team to focus on the ever-changing requirements and regulations affecting produce,” said John Ercoloni, vice president of operations for the Philadelphia-based company.

In addition to traditional customs brokerage services, J&K Fresh also provides compliance guidance, C-TPAT guidance, reconciliation, certified document imaging storage and data integration.

“Business is more consistent now and drawn back to a little more normalcy post-pandemic,” Ercoloni said. “There’s been less surprises and more balance to the trade in general, which is good. I think the industry is starting to draw at a better balance.”

For instance, ocean freight pricing is more in-tune to what growers have seen pre-pandemic, with rates and inland transportation no longer in flux, with rates coming down a bit.

“The overall land to cost on the fruit is much more palatable,” Ercoloni said. “That creates better predictability. As these costs are less in flux, it creates that predictability for the growers, exporters and importers around the world — particularly for the U.S. market.”

J&K Fresh is seeing steady volumes of fruit arrive at the ports and mostly everything is moving through the supply chain without too many issues, which J&K Fresh noted is good to see after a rough couple of years.

“These past years with COVID-19, we often didn’t know what the following day was going to bring,” Ercoloni said. “Now, it’s more consistent with better predictability.”

Although the company works in all the ports nationally, its home in Philadelphia is important because for import deals the city is what Ercoloni 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.”

It helped that there were a number of service providers who understood how to handle the product, warehouses with cold storage to handle the capacity, repack facilities that knew the intricacies of packing fruit properly, and terminals that new the sense of urgency with perishable cargos.