At the beginning of 2013 the logistics supplier EuroFruitPorts was founded in Antwerp. It is a joint venture between Euroports and Compagnie Fruitière. Manager Peter Tops talks about the company's activities: "At EuroFruitPorts one ship is unloaded per week and it primarily contains bananas, with some mangos, pineapples, coconuts and cherry tomatoes. The products come from Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon. The ship travels from West Africa over the course of around four weeks and then heads to Dover, where around 40% of the fruit is unloaded. The rest is done here. We load the ship back up again too, full with export goods such as second hand cars, packaging materials, potatoes and onions and containers with fish and meat on the upper decks. The products are delivered to various European countries after this."
Jan Simons (Operations Supervisor) and Peter Tops (General Manager)
200,000 tonnes of fruit
EuroFruitPorts has a 13,600 m2 cooling house which is fully operational at a total site of 38,700 m2. "We believe it is important that everything is safe and neat, so we carry out strict controls," emphasises Peter. "We unload around 200,000 tonnes of fruit from the shop per year, and 50,000 tonnes from containers. This is an average of 3500 pallets of bananas and 1000 pallets of other fruit per week. Most fruit is gone from here within a few days. There are a few hundred pallets left on Friday, when we prepare the storage space for Monday's new arrivals."
EuroFruitPorts uses an automatised storage system. "Everything can be found in the warehouse very easily by using coordinates. We regularly carry out improvement here, in the areas of saving energy and safety too." Peter Tops indicates that they are mainly a storage company. "We unload the products, store them and load them onto the customer's lorry."
Quality controls
Compagnie Fruitière is a large group and controls the chain from the plantation to the customer. The company also has a share of 49% in EuroFruitPorts. Compagnie Fruitière leads a team of fruit sorters and conducts its own quality controls in EuroFruitPorts' coldstore. "It is important that all bananas arrive here green," Quality controller Lesley des Enfans explains. "We know which pallets come from which farm, so we can see what stands out among certain deliveries in our database. Afterwards we give feedback to our supplier. One of the top brands that we supply is SCB. We also have strong demands regarding the sizes, the SCB banana has to be at least 20 centimetres."
Quality controller Lesly des Enfans
Long term collaboration
According to Peter customers have more possibilities to choose a logistics supplier in the Antwerp docks than they did a few years ago. "We define ourselves because we have a joint venture with our customers. We are also only looking for customers who wish to build up a long term collaboration. EuroFruitPorts is always ready to expand, but I don't expect this in the short term. Of course we still have some space in the cold store, so we can serve the smaller banana importers who import a few containers per week. We offer two temperature zones, 13.5 for bananas and 7/8 degrees for pineapples, mangos and coconuts."
Location
Peter believes that the location in Antwerp is ideal. "Some things need improvement, we notice that a port like Rotterdam has made huge investments. But I'm sure that a port like Antwerp has the ability to gain a better competitive position, as soon as we solve the traffic issues around Antwerp. Our main advantages are that we work quickly and have a good location."
For more information:
Peter Tops
Eurofruitports NV
Land van Waaslaan 5
Haven 1207 - 9130
Kallo - Belgium
T +32 3 570 35 39
M +32 497 52 96 39
www.eurofruitports.com
www.fruitiere.fr