Sunkist Set to Start Huge Fruit Shipments From Port of Hueneme : Commerce: Grower’s business will increase facility’s revenues by 20%, create jobs and boost county’s reputation as an agricultural center.

The deep-water Port of Hueneme, which shipped guns and tanks across the Pacific when it opened during World War II, is poised to begin shipping 400 million pounds of citrus fruit a year to Pacific Rim consumers.

Sunkist Growers Assn., the massive marketing cooperative of 6,500 citrus farmers, will shift its export operations from Long Beach to Port Hueneme with the completion of the largest refrigerated warehouse on any dock in the Western Hemisphere.

With the first cargo of Sunkist fruit scheduled to begin loading Dec. 9, port officials say they expect shipments by the export giant to increase annual port revenues by 20%, or $1 million.

Exports of oranges, lemons and grapefruit by Sunkist, valued at $350 million a year, will also create more work for the port’s 99 union longshoremen and warehouse workers and 250 part-time, non-union workers as 70 more ships call on the port each year.

Port Hueneme longshoremen now average just three days work a week, said Port Commissioner Jess Ramirez, the first longshoreman to serve on the commission in the district’s 56-year history. Many of the longshoremen travel to Los Angeles or Long Beach harbor on off days to supplement their pay, he said.

Operations at the small, 70-acre harbor are puny compared to the Los Angeles and Long Beach operations. The Port of Hueneme handled 485,000 tons of cargo in 1993, a mere speck compared to the 54.8 million tons handled by Long Beach and 47.2 million tons by Los Angeles.

The arrival of Sunkist, port officials say, culminates a long period of growth during which the port solidified its role as a specialist in bulk cargo, that cargo not pre-loaded into the huge, modular containers that are favored by larger ports.

“We have established ourselves as a successful niche port in Southern California handling bulk cargo,” Port Director Tony Taormina said. “In the past five years, we’ve carved out an identity among California ports as a specialist in fresh fruit and automobiles.”

By any measure, the new refrigerated warehouse is a huge addition to the Port of Hueneme.

At 140,559 square feet, the twin buildings cover an area about the size of three football fields. The cold-brine refrigeration system--which can chill 2 million cubic feet of air to a temperature of 41 degrees--is the equivalent of 100,000 kitchen refrigerators.

While larger refrigerated warehouses exist--Terminal Freezers in Oxnard contains 4.6 million cubic feet, for instance--the new Cool Carriers warehouse is the largest built on valuable dock space in North America, said Gerry Fountain, president of Cool Carriers USA.

“Nobody wants to put a facility on their dock because it’s basically a transit shed,” Fountain said. Larger ports with the room for handling containerized cargo can make several times more profit off the same area, he said.

The Port of Long Beach, from where Sunkist products are exported, turned down Cool Carriers’ request for a 20-year lease to build the warehouse there, Fountain said.

The cost of the $10-million Hueneme facility was shared by the Oxnard Port District--which paid two-thirds--and Cool Carriers, the Scandinavian shipping company that operates the world’s largest fleet of refrigerated ships.

When Sunkist begins shipping from the port, the company will store 10 million cartons of citrus fruit a year in the warehouse for loading onto Cool Carriers’ refrigerated ships. Sunkist’s 200,000 tons of exports account for 5% of all non-containerized trade a year on the West Coast and will increase the volume of goods shipped through Port Hueneme by nearly 50%, Taormina said.

Bill Quarles, Sunkist vice president for corporate relations, said the refrigerated warehouse will provide two main benefits to the company.

“One large advantage is that our fruit can be refrigerated for the entirety of the journey to our customers, and the fruit will have a longer shelf life once it arrives,” he said. The storage facility the company uses at the Long Beach port is an open-air shed where fruit is kept at room temperature before loading on Cool Carriers’ refrigerated ships.

Second, Quarles said, Sunkist will be able to use the refrigerated warehouse to treat its fruit before shipping if pests such as the Mediterranean fruit fly should prompt other countries to quarantine California citrus. One method of eliminating fruit flies is to chill the fruit to a temperature that kills the adult flies and larvae.

“If our fruit had to be quarantined by a foreign market, we could take the pulp down to the mid-30s for extensive periods of time,” Quarles said. “The refrigerated terminal gives us the extra capacity to do that.”

Even though many of Sunkist’s growers and 14 of its 65 packinghouses are in Ventura County, Quarles said the savings in transportation costs is expected to be small.

“The primary benefit will be fewer returns, with fewer claims against Sunkist for poor arrivals” of fruit, Quarles said. “We’ve always desired a refrigerated facility, but it’s only recently that Cool Carriers and the Oxnard Port District got their heads together and figured out how to provide it.”

While Sunkist expects to receive immediate dividends from the new facility, other Ventura County agricultural interests say the refrigerated warehouse will have little effect on other produce shippers in the short run.

Jim Donovan, director of international operations for Mission Produce in Oxnard, said his firm will probably not use the warehouse because it does not export enough avocados to warrant the use of bulk shipments.

“For us, shipping from Port Hueneme makes all the sense in the world, but our volume is not large enough to do that,” Donovan said. Mission Produce shipped 240,000 34-pound cartons of avocados to Japan this year, enough to fill 10 cargo containers or just one small ship’s hold, he said.

Instead, Mission trucks its export avocados in refrigerated containers to Los Angeles, where they are loaded aboard cargo ships.

Earl McPhail, Ventura County’s agricultural commissioner, said most of the county’s perishable fruit for export, such as strawberries, is either flown by air cargo or shipped from Long Beach in smaller containers.

Yet McPhail said the presence of the refrigerated warehouse and Sunkist’s export operations could help boost the county’s reputation as an agricultural center.

“The facility could increase the visibility of agriculture in the county and could in time make us known as the hub of the citrus industry,” McPhail said. Ventura County farmers are already the largest producers of lemons in California.

The facility could also be used to treat fruit imported from Chile and Ecuador that has not been cleared by U. S. customs inspectors, he said, adding to the county’s agricultural resources.

“And as long as you keep the agricultural infrastructure strong, you can keep agriculture strong in the county,” McPhail said.

Construction of the state-of-the-art warehouse was part of a $26-million expansion program that began after the port district acquired 19 acres of Navy property in 1985 and built a second wharf.

“The harbor was expanded and then expanded again,” said Commission President Edward J. Millan, who worked for the district for 31 years, the last 15 as port director, before retiring in 1985. Millan won a seat on the commission two years later.

Since Millan’s election, other commissioners with experience at the harbor have also won seats, including Ramirez last year and Raymond E. Fosse, a ship’s pilot, who was elected three years ago.

The new commission has accomplished many of the goals set years earlier.

“We had been trying to attract Cool Carriers for years,” Millan recalled. “Ranchers in Ventura County had always been willing to use us--there’s a lot of citrus in the county--but shippers were unwilling to use us because we weren’t a port of entry.”

That changed two years ago when the district was awarded port of entry status by federal authorities, which allows U. S. Customs officers to clear arriving goods at the port. “Clearly, the port of entry enables us to announce to the world that we are a full-service port with all the amenities,” said Taormina, who succeeded Millan as port director.

As the harbor has expanded and become home port for such importers as BMW of North America and Mazda of America, the pace of economic activity has quickened. A 1987 study by the city of Port Hueneme estimated that the 200 ships that called at the port each year created a $200-million impact on the local economy. With the Sunkist account, ship arrivals could approach 300 a year, Taormina said.

Cargoes vary from offshore oil equipment, European and Japanese automobiles, to crops as diverse as onions, grapes, citrus, wheat seeds and bananas. Cool Carriers also imported 22,700 tons of frozen meat last year from Australia. Port officials also see occasional shipments of specialized equipment, such as an Australian gold mill bound for Idaho or a Caterpillar tractor headed for Japan that was so large its components were shipped on five railroad cars.

Fosse, who followed his father’s career as a ship’s captain and port commissioner, said the harbor’s narrow entrance will have to be expanded if the port is to continue to grow.

“This is a very tight, restrictive port with a high degree of difficulty,” said Fosse, who continues to pilot ships in and out of the Port of Hueneme for the Navy.

But, barring closure of the Naval Construction Battalion Center, the port will continue to find its own way as a pint-sized operation when measured against the massive ports in Los Angeles County.

“Long Beach and Los Angeles will dedicate themselves to container trade,” Taormina noted. “As long as they do, there will be a position for us.”