No pressure
He indicates that one of the main reasons for switching to a contract with a container shipping company is do with the fact that Ecuadorian Line couldn't always fill the big ships (with space for 450 40 feet containers) completely. "Our ships had a reasonable capacity and we were under pressure to fill them every week. The evolving market conditions of the European banana industry mean it is necessary to align supply and demand. Now we can move around units of 20 pallets per container. We can also grow back to a volume that we want to supply in the market. Trading fruit is not an option."
Erik says that this isn't the first time they have worked with containers. "We have been working with container shipping companies in the Mediterranean for a while. We worked with MSC two years ago and have been working with Maersk since 2013, so the container experience is there. Now we have taken this step in Northern Europe too. There are few other ships in the pipeline and there are also few other ships that can guarantee the same service we did ourselves. MSC has engaged in this and are the only ones who could change the transit time."
Antwerp is the first port
The ships will arrive within 15/16 days of loading and will come to Antwerp as the first port. In principle the service visited other ports in Central America first. Then it was Bremerhaven, Rotterdam and Antwerp. Now Antwerp is the first port in the service. It is a service very close to what we did with our ships. We wanted as little disruption for our customers. This is why all the fruit arrives at BNFW. We take all the containers from the MSC container terminal to BNFW and distribute our bananas from there."
"Our experience in the Mediterranean was with a volume of 80 to 100 containers per week, spread out over a number of ports. The difference here is that most will go to Antwerp. A lot of these logistics are known in Ecuador too and we have high expectations of the new line. If all goes well we will charter out our own reefers on the long term or offer other services for other customers. Our ships have a good reputation, so the phone never stops ringing."
'Containerised'
He indicates that the arrivals in a lot of ports have already been 'containerised'. "Antwerp is the last port where is all still arrives conventionally, and we are the first ones to change this. Antwerp will be very different in five years, I expect a lot of colleagues to follow us with containers."