Shadowing Practice: The Logistics of Fruit - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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In many ways, bananas are the simple ones.
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Other fruits, like grapes, can only grow in certain cooler climates typically found a decent distance from the equator, yet can't grow in winter,
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therefore dictating a certain harvest period starting in late summer and ending in late fall.
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This makes extending availability year-round challenging.
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Other fruit is just inherently seasonal, like apples.
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In addition to also requiring moderate enough temperatures during their growing season, apple trees need cold winter weather to stimulate flower buds.
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They need to grow in places with distinct seasons so they always harvest in fall, once again making year-round supply unnatural.
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Bananas though?
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They're easy.
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They don't require seasonality, they grow in warm tropical climates, and warm tropical climates are found, well, in the tropics.
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The tropics flank the equator, meaning they experience little to no seasonal temperature swings, allowing for year-round harvests.
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The only problem is, the tropics only encompass 47 degrees of latitude, yet there are 133 other degrees, nearly all of which filled with people who want bananas,
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and specifically fresh bananas, year-round.
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So the year-round production is simple, distribution is not.
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Each week, all the banana plantations in Ecuador contracted to distribute with dole start their harvest on Tuesday or Wednesday.
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Dole doesn't do much growing itself in the country, most of it is done by thousands of small to mid-size independent plantations.
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Teams of two bananeros head out into the fields and find fully grown bunches.
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One cuts the stem with a machete, the other grabs it and places it onto their shoulder.
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They carry it to a nearby cableway system that stretches all throughout the plantation, then insert foam padding between the banana hands for protection from bruising during transport.
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Next, a mule pulls the train of bunches down the cableway to the central packing plant.
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There, banana hands are cut from the bunch and tossed into a tank of soapy water for cleaning, and they're picked up by a worker on the other end
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who arranges them on a tray sized to roughly correspond with the number needed to fill a box.
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But before packing, a waxy coating is painted onto the stems.
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Covering the cut portion slows the plant's emission of ethylene, the hormone that ripens fruit.
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They specifically do not want the plant to turn yellow in transport.
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In fact, if a banana turns yellow in the transport process, it will be rejected from import into the US since it increases the risk of also including pests.
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But far before that, the bananas are packed into bags, which are packed into boxes, which are packed into a truck, which departs for the country's primary port city, Guayaquil.
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On Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, Guayaquil streets are clogged with hundreds upon hundreds of trucks laden with Dole-branded refrigerated containers,
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all destined for their dedicated facility at the city's southwest corner called Banana Puerto.
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Now, it's quite rare for an individual exporter to operate a dedicated port facility—more often,
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they just contract with a major multinational container shipping company like Maerscore CMA and insert their cargo into their supply chain.
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But the traditional container supply chain doesn't really work for Dole, or any banana exporter for that matter.
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As a relatively small country, Ecuador doesn't see a ton of container ship traffic.
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Certainly not none, but even of the moderate amount it experiences, much of that capacity is headed to and from Asia.
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Rather few of the ships that call at Guayaquil are en route to North America, meaning Dole would struggle to find frequent container capacity on this rather niche routing.
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And frequency, of course, matters a lot for fresh fruit exports.
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A traditional exporter of non-perishable goods can just send a ton of product all at once
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when a ship happens to make the desired journey, but Dole needs a regular supply of bananas entering the US to keep shelves stocked with fresh product.
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And upping the challenge, bananas are shipped in refrigerated containers.
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While bananas don't need refrigeration, refrigeration slows the ripening process
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so it's the only way to get the fruit to US ports in the required pre-ripe green state.
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On traditional cargo ships, though, only a small portion of the thousands upon thousands of container positions have the required hookups to power
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and monitor a refrigerated container, meaning Dole would have to work with just a portion of the capacity of the already limited supply.
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So rather, Dole operates their own cargo ships.
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Each Friday, following the multi-day loading process, one of the four ships assigned to this route pulls away from the port of Guayaquil, snakes its way through the coastal estuary, and enters the open ocean.
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Three days later, it arrives in Caldera, Costa Rica.
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Dole also sources plenty of bananas and pineapples from the country, but there's a hurdle.
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The vast majority of Costa Rica's container cargo goes to and from its east coast, via the port of Liman.
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The country's largest Pacific port is that of Caldera, but this facility is comparatively tiny—it's not even equipped with traditional container cranes,
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making loading large volumes of cargo wildly inefficient.
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This undergirds a further justification for Dole's ship ownership.
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They have cranes built in on board, allowing them to operate to less developed ports, as are common in many of the small Latin American countries from which they source fruit.
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Following this stop, Dole's weekly Pacific route continues to Puerto Quetzal in Guatemala, before arriving at its final destination of the port of San Diego on Sunday,
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nine days after departure, and no more than twelve following harvest.
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San Diego is not a busy container port—the vast majority of inbound West Coast container traffic docks in Los Angeles
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and Long Beach—but operating to San Diego allows the company to
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to again lease their own dedicated port facility at a relatively low cost, enabling high reliability of delivery each Sunday with low risk of port congestion.
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From there, the process is more conventional.
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The vessel begins unloading its 45 million or so pieces of fruit, and following a customs and USDA inspection, long-haul trucks come in to fetch the containers.
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The vast majority are headed to grocery distribution centers like this one, operated by Kroger in Las Vegas.
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On arrival, a Kroger employee takes a sample of bananas from each pallet for inspection, then sources them into groups of similar ripeness.
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Next, a given batch is rolled into their ripening room where ethylene gas is pumped in to speed the process along.
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Once complete, distribution continues as normal.
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Pallets are broken down, new pallets are assembled, where bananas are grouped with other food bound for each and every Kroger store.
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Now, it's certainly impressive that bananas travel thousands upon thousands of miles
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and end up sold at a grocery store just two weeks after harvest for a mere couple of dollars.
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But the year-round growing season makes this primarily a logistics challenge.
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Apples, however, are a different situation.
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They harvest in fall, and only in fall, yet are sold year-round.
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There are more than 100 varieties of apples grown and sold in the US, there are over 30 grown for commercial production in the state of Washington alone,
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and at any given store at any given time in the US there are likely 5 to 12 varieties for sale.
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The commonality across all these options, though, is that the sticker, or bag, or box is almost certain to read U-S-A.
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Apples, then, are effectively the opposite of bananas—they're diverse in variety, but highly uniform in their place of origin.
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They're either from New York, or Michigan, or most likely Washington, where 60% of the US supply is grown.
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Across all fresh produce, that makes apples unique, as they're really the only fresh fruit sold every month of the year in the US, grown exclusively in the US.
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On the surface, that makes the logistics seem simple.
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If you were to buy this particular package of organic Cosmic Crisp apples from this Sam's Club in Council Bluffs, Iowa, you could just take the listed place of origin, Stemmelt Growers in Wenatchee, Washington,
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and draw a line of refrigerated trucks from the Stemmelt Growers warehouse to Walmart's regional fresh produce warehouse, then finally to the store.
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But that overlooks a lot.
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Consider the consumer's decision to pick the bag of Cosmic Crisps rather than any other option in the first place, and consider the ability to do so in spring.
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a remarkable seven months after these apples were picked off the tree.
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In the biggest apple state, Stemmel Growers is one of the biggest apple growers.
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Not only does it operate a massive warehouse facility, it owns and farms some 10,000 acres of land around this facility,
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and it employs some 1,500 people year-round and some 5,000 when it comes to harvest season.
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It's big enough even to grow and market its own proprietary varieties, and build out its own brand image across the ten separate varieties of apples
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that come in Stemmel Growers boxes and are adorned by a Stemmelt sticker.
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Yet, while a massive mover in the industry with its own distinct marketing, Stemmelt growers doesn't attach any of its branding to the Cosmic Crisp, because it doesn't own the Cosmic Crisp.
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That distinction belongs to Washington State University.
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So while it has to pay a fee to license this apple, Stemmelt grows this apple because it's particularly good at solving for the key logistical problem
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that apples present as a crop only sourced in the US, only harvested a few weeks of the year, and expected by the customer to be available at all times of the year.
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It was an arm of WSU's extension service, just a couple miles down the road from Stemmelt, that sought to combine the merits of the tasty
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but fickle Honeycrisp with the less exciting but durable and late ripening traits of the enterprise variety in 1994.
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By 2017, the school was confident
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that they had come up with a winner for Washington growers looking to shore up the late season and long storage supply, and began to sell the tree.
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But given all the choices available to the commercial producer and the apple consumer alike, the school took it a step further and partnered with a company to market the apple.
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That partnership was responsible for taking WA38, as the apple was called, and creating the Cosmic Crisp, a name accompanied by stickers,
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bags, and boxes that differentiated it from the rest.
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The image, along with the apple's favorable traits, proved enticing enough for some of Washington's largest producers to jump through the hoops
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that come with growing an apple that isn't theirs.
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To grow Cosmic Crisps, a producer first has to buy from one of only 11 nurseries
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that have been licensed to grow and sell the tree.
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For each tree purchased, there's a dollar royalty.
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Then, for the fruit harvested at a price higher than $20 a bushel, a 4.75% fee on the sale.
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And finally, when it's time to ship, the producer is required to bag, box, and distribute using the Cosmic Crisp branding instead of its own.
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The apple's relatively late harvest season, along with its uniquely long shelf and storage life, ease the major logistical hurdle of America's domestic apple supply,
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but don't solve it.
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Keeping an apple fresh for up to a year calls for more than a robust variety
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or a robust cold chain—it requires freezing time, at least from the apple's perspective.
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This starts in the field as apples are harvested by hand, then binned by the bushel, whence preliminary field tests indicate that the fruit has reached a desired level of ripening.
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This level will vary depending on what's needed.
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If apples are required to meet projected demand far later in the year, they'll be picked earlier in their ripening process.
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Conversely, if apples are destined to meet more immediate demand, they'll be allowed to ripen longer on the tree and distributed sooner.
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To best time this, apples will be tested on firmness and starch and sugar composition for weeks leading into the harvest season.
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Once harvested, the bushels are rushed to a warehouse to cool as soon as possible.
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At Stemmelt, that means here to what they call the fresh cube.
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Upon arrival, the apples take different paths depending on their sugar content and relative maturity.
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Those with high starch content are sent as quickly as possible to controlled atmosphere rooms.
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These cooled rooms are the sole reason that American apples are able to be sourced domestically all year round.
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Within them, apples are effectively put to sleep, as the temperature is dropped to just above freezing,
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and most critically, the oxygen level and carbon dioxide level is decreased within these airtight walls to somewhere usually under 3%, depending on the exact variety.
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This slows the apple's respiratory process to a crawl, which in turn ensures it doesn't turn starches into sugars quite yet, stalling the ripening process.
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Housed within these chambers for months on end, once they're demanded by the outside market, the apples are moved from the airtight walls to the refrigerated floor where they are packed and palletized.
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While the fresh cube is massive, stretching the length of seven football fields, what makes it unique is its density,
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as all stem-out fruit packing is done under this roof with the help of an automated fleet of robotic pallet carriers.
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This allows for far more compact storage of some 13,000 pallets, 60% more carrying capacity than a manual system.
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Working around the clock, across five levels and six rows of pallets, the system pulls the oldest pallets with the quickly maturing products to loading stations during the day,
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and reorganizes the queues during the night, saving on labor and ensuring these soon ripening crops are ready to move to refrigerated trucks in the morning.
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While massive, this facility isn't alone.
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Within its own industrial park there's competition, and across the state there are similarly sized facilities all doing more or less the same, moving around
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and manipulating apples from controlled atmosphere room to reefer truck to
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ensure products picked nearly a year earlier can be consumed as fresh fruit half a country away.
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But there are yet other fruits that can't grow in warm equatorial climates, nor can store for months on end like apples.
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Take grapes.
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A vine fruit, it can take several years just for the plant to mature enough to produce table grapes, and even then, they're a crop that's harvestable only in specific seasons
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and are as ripe as they'll get the moment they're picked.
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And yet, grapes show up on American plates all year round.
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It starts here, in the Valparaiso region of northern Chile, where glacial runoff in the Andes feeds the Aconcagua Valley and its orchards,
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watering the 130 million tons of the fruit that are produced annually.
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Starting in November and December, dozens of varieties of grapes bud, bloom, fruit, and then ripen throughout March, April, and May.
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This timeline, purposefully spread out over the Chilean summer and fall, would be sufficient to simply provide South Americans with grapes during its fruit season,
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but that's not the purpose of these fields.
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The season for Chilean grapes is even longer than natural since
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more than half of the country's supply goes to the United States, its number one market.
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And that's only possible thanks to a bit of science.
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Here in Valparaiso is Santa Elena, a producer with several farms and facilities.
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This one here, near San Jose, produces eight varieties of grapes—the Thompson, Sable, Muscat Beauty, Chrissy, Sweet Celebration,
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Cotton Candy, Sweet Globe, and finally, the Autumn Crisp.
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Developed by Sun World International, a leading company in fruit breeding, this proprietary blend is licensed by the company out to growers on almost every continent around the world, like Santa Elena.
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The Autumn Crisp is a large green seedless grape
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that was developed during an 11-year breeding process of cross-pollination to create a late-season grape
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that could produce higher yields with reduced production costs—and it just tasted better.
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The modified grape blend takes a natural grape and gives it super qualities like extended shelf life and late harvest.
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And because these grapes can be harvested from March into May, it's critical that they stay fresh once they're plucked from the vines.
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This starts in processing facilities, like one of Santa Elena's four plants, where the grapes are cleaned, and then sorted, selected, and packaged in a series of production lines,
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all done in a room that's meticulously temperature and humidity controlled.
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Each box is tagged with a tracking number to monitor its journey north, which must start within six days of harvest.
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The boxes are stacked onto a pallet, and every pallet can transport between 50 to 100 boxes, depending on the producer.
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While waiting to leave Chile, grapes sit in cold storage, at an ideal temperature of 30-32 degrees Fahrenheit, or negative 1-0 Celsius.
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Then the 20 pallets are loaded into a 40-foot refrigerated container that's put onto a container ship.
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Now these grapes are headed 5,000 miles
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or 8,000 kilometers north destined for the United States to ensure that the fruit is available year-round, even when Americans can't grow their own.
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Unlike with Ecuadorian bananas, shipping giant Maersk has configured its operations to accommodate the Chilean grape traffic.
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Along Valparaiso, they travel from this port through the Panama Canal to Manzanillo, a port city in Panama,
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where the container is transferred to another ship on a route headed through the Caribbean that continues to this port in Philadelphia.
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Philadelphia is not necessarily a city people think of when they think of fruit, but it's uniquely situated to be a hub for produce.
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First of all, it's here, on the eastern seaboard, and within a six-hour drive of more than 80 million potential customers—nearly one-quarter of America's population.
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It's also just above the 39th parallel.
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Historically, the USDA required certain fruits, including grapes, to be imported above this line to reduce the spread of warm-weather pests.
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While this regulation is no longer in place, thanks to this, Philadelphia got a head start on building out produce-receiving infrastructure, including reefer plugs, cold storage,
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and system nodes that connect it to the rest of the United States and make it a gateway for perishables.
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The gateway for table grapes once the Chilean pipeline wanes in May moves to the US-Mexico border.
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Here, in the Sonoran region, Mexican grapes are ready to pull off the vine from mid-May to mid-July, and some 25 million boxes enter the United States in reefer
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trucks just north of the Sonoran state through Nogales to bridge the gap between Chile's season and America's.
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But by July, the United States can produce its own supply of table grapes, and essentially the only place this happens is California.
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Grape production starts in the Coachella Valley, and moves north as the summer carries on to the San Joaquin Valley.
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99% of American grapes come from this fertile part of America, an industry worth some 2.1 billion dollars.
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To protect that, in Philadelphia, stringent fumigation and inspections processes are set up to control foreign produce entering the country from places like Chile,
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including dedicated warehouses set for customs inspections.
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And grapes, specifically, undergo a methyl bromide fumigation to kill off lingering pests like the Chilean red mite.
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Mexican grapes follow less stringent import regulations than those from Chile, and undergo the standard border inspection.
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While the means of sourcing these three year-round staples of every American supermarket's fresh fruit section are vastly different from one another, where they're similar is in the fact that they're remarkably dialed in.
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Decent quality bananas are simply always available—the same goes for apples, the same goes for grapes.
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This goes a long way in informing why bananas are America's most popular fruit, why apples are America's second favorite and far more popular in their fresh form than any other,
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and why the average American's eating more grapes now than ever before.
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Not only are these fruits available whenever, they're going to be at least decent whenever, allowing for confident and consistent consumer purchases.
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Putting this reality in stark relief are the fruits
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that we simply haven't figured out how to supply 12 months of the year—fruit that may be highly popular, but just too fickle to crack.
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Take the peach.
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Statistically, when surveyed, Americans rank peaches as their favorite or near their favorite summer fruits.
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Anecdotally, Americans love peaches—there are just few things better on a hot day than a cool, perfectly ripe, juicy peach.
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And yet, the average American eats about one-tenth the quantity of fresh peaches as they do for fresh apples.
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More troubling for peach growers, average consumption of peaches is dropping.
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While more cultivars have come to production to try and solve for the difficulties of shipping them, consumers have turned away from the fruit largely on account of a lack of trust.
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A great peach may well be better than a great apple, but a bag of apples is bound to be more consistent than a bag of peaches.
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Peaches just don't last on the shelf like other fruit—their soft flesh is easy to bruise, and their peak freshness seems difficult to predict for the consumer,
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so the consumer simply goes with what they know.
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For producers, there's just nothing they can take from the other fruits' playbook.
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They can't vary their sourcing far beyond the US because peaches are too soft to ship in major bulk, they can't rely on the tropics because peaches aren't tropical, they can't freeze a peach in time like they can an apple.
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America's iconic dessert is the apple pie rather than the peach pie, in part because of the prolific availability of apples.
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Bananas rank as number one for consumption since they transport so well.
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Fresh table grapes and blueberries and blackberries reliably sit on store shelves year-round, whereas cherries and nectarines and concord grapes do not.
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Fascinatingly, the supply chain has shaped taste and cuisine.
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You eat what you eat, because the logistics make you. So you like logistics.
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Either that, or you fell asleep, because we made it through 20 minutes of talking about where fruit comes from.
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Well, good news for those of you awake, we made a whole series about the logistics behind phenomena like the hajj, coal mining, search and rescue, and more.
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It's called The Logistics of X, and it's available exclusively through our sponsor, Nebula.
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Nebula is a streaming service founded, owned, and run by digital creators like myself.
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In the five years since, it's grown massively, and now funds the production of a pretty impressive quantity
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and quality of original content like The Logistics of X.
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My team also makes a live comedy debate show called Abolish Everything, we just finished filming an upcoming original called Scav in Chicago following the world's largest annual scavenger hunt,
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and we're far from the only creators making Nebula originals.
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I think Wendover viewers will particularly enjoy real-life lore series Modern Conflicts, diving deep into the day-to-day progression of major recent conflicts,
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and he just released a fantastic episode about the manhunt for El Chapo.
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There's also a new original coming out very soon by Bobby Broccoli called Seventeen Pages, investigating one of the largest scientific controversies of the 20th century.
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All in all, Nebula enables high production value content
216
that is just more unique than what you can typically get out of the major streamers.
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After all, the entire business model was designed by creators to best support what we think is our best work.
218
This does mean it's a paywall platform, but we think that's better than an ad or sponsorship-supported one because it means we're optimizing for quality, trying to keep you subscribed longer,
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rather than just chasing clicks to drive up ad dollars.
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And it's still far cheaper than what you're used to paying for streaming services.
221
If you sign up using our link, in fact, nebula.tv slash wendover, you'll get 40% off an annual subscription, and that'll bring the effective monthly costs down to just $3.
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You'll also be helping support Wendover and hundreds of other independent creators, so thanks in advance.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Logistics of Fruit”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: apple, fruit, grape, banana, container. This video has 222 sentences and 4065 words to shadow. The speech runs for 21:02. The speaker talks fast, about 193 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 76% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| grape noun | /ɡɹeɪp/ | A small, round, smooth-skinned edible fruit, usually purple, red, or green, that grows in bunches on female vines of most species of genus Vitis and the… |
| banana noun | /bəˈnænə/ | An elongated curved tropical fruit of a banana plant, which grows in bunches and has a creamy flesh and a smooth skin. |
| harvest noun | /ˈhɑɹ.vəst/ | The process of gathering the ripened crop; harvesting. |
| container noun | /kənˈteɪ.nəɹ/ | An item in which objects, materials or data can be stored or transported. |
| peach noun | /ˈpiːt͡ʃ/ | Any tree of species Prunus persica, native to China and now widely cultivated throughout temperate regions, having pink flowers and edible fruit. |
| pallet noun | /ˈpælɪt/ | A bed of loose straw. |
| dhole noun | /doʊl/ | An Asian wild dog, Cuon alpinus. |
| grower noun | /ˈɡɹoʊɚ/ | A farmer; one who grows things. |
| ripen verb | /ˈɹaɪpən/ | Of grain, fruit, flowers, etc., to grow ripe; to become mature. |
| refrigerate verb | /ɹɪˈfɹɪd͡ʒəɹeɪt/ | To keep (something) cool by containing within a refrigerator. |
| logistics noun | /ləˈd͡ʒɪstɪks/ | The process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services and related information from their point of… |
| nebula noun | /ˈnɛb.jə.lə/ | A cloud in outer space consisting of gas or dust (e.g. a cloud formed after a star explodes). |
| shelf noun | /ʃɛlf/ | A flat, rigid structure, fixed at right angles to a wall or forming a part of a cabinet, desk, etc., and used to display, store, or support objects. |
| tropic noun | /ˈtɹɒpɪk/ | Either of the two parallels of latitude 23°26′ north and south of the equator; the farthest points at which the sun can be directly overhead; the boundaries of… |
| warehouse noun | /ˈwɛə(ɹ)haʊs/ | A facility for storing large amounts of merchandise or products. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). | |
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| drive up verb | To cause or force a price, quantity, rate, etc. to increase. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| get off verb | To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are found · is done · are cut |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have been licensed · has reached · has configured |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who want · bags, which are |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 41 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, can't, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shelf /ʃɛlf/, bushel /ˈbuʃəl/, fumigation /ˈfjuːmɪɡeɪʃən/, plantation /plænˈteɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: refrigerate /ɹɪˈfɹɪd͡ʒəɹeɪt/, fumigation /ˈfjuːmɪɡeɪʃən/, logistical /ləˈdʒɪ.stɪ.k(ə)l/, proprietary /pɹəˈpɹaɪ.ə.tə.ɹi/, accompany /əˈkʌm.pə.ni/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like grape, banana, harvest.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.