Philadelphia, PA USA – The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently allowed blueberries from Chile to be fumigated on arrival at USA ports. This enables exporters who are unable to fumigate at country of origin to have an alternative so that they can ship. It also creates a need to “Re-Cool” those berries immediately.
Not all USA port cold stores or nearby 3PLs have precoolers, which can be used for re-cooling the berries. But for those that do, the ability to quickly and thoroughly remove the heat from the fruit, and thus preserve shelf life and salable weight while reducing the need for repacking, is a tremendous benefit they can provide to their customers – the importing sales agencies, and in some case, retailers themselves.
“Re-cooling is different than precooling,” according to Jim Still, founder and president of Global Cooling Inc., which invented and manufactures both the Jet-Ready and Rapid-Cool pre-coolers and re-coolers. Global's factory is located at the Philadelphia Navy Yard industrial complex, near PHL airport and all the ports of Philadelphia and South Jersey. “With precooling, usually a large amount of refrigeration capacity is needed in conjunction with the forced-air system or tunnel, because of the need to remove all of the field heat from the produce.”
“But with re-cooling,” Still continued, “we are only removing the heat gained by bringing the commodity back up from ideal storage temperature to one at which the methyl bromide is effective, according to the USDA requirements. Often, this re-cooling refrigeration load is only 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit,” he explained, “instead of the 40 to 50 degrees we have to deal with when fully precooling. In almost all instances, one or several of our Jet-Ready instant PreCoolers can be put into operation for re-cooling, and no additional refrigeration equipment is needed. For a very, very small investment, a cold storage operator can get into the re-cooling business almost overnight.”
DLJ Produce in Long Beach, California, is using three Jet Pre-Coolers to re-cool berries this season, after having started with re-cooling Chilean grapes last year. Mike Asdoorian, head of operations for DLJ, says “we've had great results using the Jets to re-cool berries early this season.” Asdoorian continued, explaining that with labor issues constricting the amount of imported fruit currently passing through the west coast ports, “we can handle a lot more berries and grapes than we are running at present,” which is a huge point of differentiation from many of DLJ's competitors.
DLJ has also cooled apples and other commodities, noting that the Jet PreCoolers are portable and can be easily moved from a room running at one temperature into a different room running at another temperature. “Sometimes you get limited or you’re doing different things, and in cold storage you can’t necessarily use that same space over and over again. If you need to move it or do different functions with it, it’s great for that.”
In the Philadelphia area, Global's precoolers are used by a number of service providers for re-cooling both grapes and berries. These include Lucca Cold Storage and Manfredi Cold Storage – both of whom also offer repackaging services – and Diamond State Port Corp., at the port of Wilmington, Delaware. Two of the companies also use Global's Rapid-Cool 2- and 3-tier precoolers, which offer even faster pulldown times as well as the benefits of reversing airflow during the re-cooling process.
“Your Jet units move an awful lot of air,” commented Rusty Lucca of Lucca Cold
Storage. “We've been running berries every day,” said Frank Manfredi of Manfredi Cold Storage. According to Frank Vignuli, Director of Operations for Diamond State Port Corp., the company is “very pleased to offer re-cooling as an additional service to our customers.”
For more information, see www.Pre-Coolers.net. Or eMail to: Solutions@Pre-Coolers.net . Or call 1-610-248-9800. Jim Still, Founder/President/CVO, Global Cooling Inc.
Source: Global Cooling Inc.
