Maersk Container Industry, ASOEX boost cooperation
With a new memorandum of understanding, Maersk Container Industry (MCI) and the Chilean fruit exporters association, ASOEX, will bolster their cooperation to ensure that more food makes it from farm to fork.
“Good food should always move all the way from farm to fork,” said Peter K Nymand, chief executive officer of the MCI Group. “Our ambition is to unleash Chile’s export potential and avoid waste of food.”
Input from Chilean exporters will help MCI design even better reefers, while MCI’s expertise will help ASOEX members make the best use of new hi-tech reefer containers soon built in Chile.
Food waste is not a problem especially linked to exports from Chile. A study from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has concluded that in Europe nearly 50% of all fresh produce never makes it to the plate. Transportation time is just one of many reasons why food goes to waste worldwide.
“The world cannot afford this, and we have technologies that can help out,” said Nymand. “For example, if you learn to control the atmosphere inside a container, you will be able to ship fresh fruit and produce longer and farther than before.”
Ronald Bown, president of ASOEX, said, “It is not easy to keep fruit at optimal conditions during transportation, so we hope to contribute with our technical and operational knowledge.”
MCI is on schedule to build a new $170 million reefer factory in San Antonio, Chile. This means new technology and energy efficient reefers will be available to exporters along the West Coast of South America in early 2014. The company already has a reefer plant in Qingdao, China.
The container manufacturing arm of the A P Moller–Maersk Group, MCI has about 6,000 employees worldwide with research and development and sales based at group headquarters in Tinglev, Denmark. Production takes place at factories in Qingdao and Dongguan, China—and by 2014 in San Antonio, Chile.
In 2011, MCI constructed 41,000 reefer containers and 37,000 reefer units. Visit www.maerskbox.com to learn more.
To see FAO’s most recent report on global food waste, go to www.fao.org/docrep/014/mb060e/mb060e00.pdf.