At the end of its first season, KHOLD and the Lona Group have officially opened their Coega Fruit Terminal in the Coega Special Economic Zone outside Port Elizabeth.
Kees van Welie, managing director of KHOLD, says that Coega Fruit Terminal is a world’s first through the scope of its integration: it brings together a packhouse, a cold store and a Container Depot under one roof, servicing all major fruit export markets.
South Africa’s first metropolitan citrus packhouse
“The unique and integrated nature of Coega Fruit Terminal generates significant cost efficiencies boosting the competitiveness of South African fruit exported from the Eastern Cape. Firstly, once fruit is packed into cartons, it will immediately be transferred into the adjacent cold store where it is placed under cooling, thus maintaining the quality of the fruit by continuously storing it in a temperature-controlled environment.”
The packhouse – the first citrus packhouse operating in a metropolitan area in South Africa – is operated by Lona Fresh, KHOLD’s sister company, packing both for exports and for local retail.
“A second benefit is that the onsite container depot eliminates the need for the exporter to collect the empty container from an external container depot, thus removing this cost and time from the current export cold chain,” he points out. This step in the existing cold chain often causes unnecessary delays and adds to traffic congestion.
Under one roof: a citrus packhouse, cold store and container depot (photo supplied by KHOLD)
Coega Fruit Terminal’s container depot offers the full suite of services including container maintenance and repair, handling and storage and plug-in of refrigerated containers, servicing all major shipping lines.
The opportunity for customers to plug in refrigerated containers makes the export process more seamless, particularly during peak periods, he remarks.
“Being able to load and stage reefer containers at the cold store prior to the opening of export stacks in the port, enables us to offer our customers increased capacity, improves the flow of container movements, reduces waiting time of trucks entering and leaving our premises.”
The first phase of the Coega Fruit Terminal project covers an area of nine hectares, with an opportunity to expand to 12 hectares in the second phase.
According to the Citrus Growers Association of Southern Africa (CGA), the Eastern Cape is the fastest growing citrus-producing region in the South Africa, to which the Coega Fruit Terminal will provide much needed capacity.
For more information:
Kees van Welie
KHOLD
Tel: +27 83 7986413
Email: [email protected]
https://www.khold.co/
