Fruitnet

The importance of air cargo services to the global fresh produce business has certainly taken off in the past 18 months as the Covid-19 pandemic has landed ocean container shipping networks with a major circulation problem. As Orlando Wong explains in the latest episode of Fruitnet’s conversation series Fruitbox, a sharp increase in demand for consumer goods in the world’s major markets has led to logjams in ports that where the traffic previously flowed freely. “The last I checked there were about 64 vessels waiting to come into dock at [the Port of] Long Beach,” he reveals. “The situation has really not improved. The container yard is quadruple stacked, [whereas] normally it’s only double stacked. Essentially, Long Beach is now like a storage dock. There is no room to work around, and the infrastructure needs to be expanded in a big way.” Wong is CEO of perishable produce logistics specialist Able Freight, and from his headquarters in Los Angeles he can see firsthand the pandemic’s impact on both sea and