Transporting the frozen to the tropics

CSCS ships frozen foods to the Caribbean, and is extending its reach.

By TIMOTHY J. GIBBONS, The Times-Union
Next time you're in Puerto Rico, say hello to any frozen chickens you run into: There's a good chance that they, too, passed through the First Coast on the way to the island.

There's also a good chance that they were handled by Caribbean Shipping and Cold Storage, a Jacksonville-based logistics company poised to become the largest player in that industry in Puerto Rico.

In the next few weeks, Caribbean will complete its merger with Eagle Logistics Systems, a Jacksonville company affiliated with AJC International, a Georgia-based company that ships a range of meats around the world.

Eagle handles shipments of dry goods to Puerto Rico, and Caribbean is one of the island's largest frozen food shippers, making the two businesses a natural fit. The merger also provides a huge platform for future growth for a company that has already appeared twice on Inc. magazine's list of 100 fastest growing inner-city companies.

It's not the type of growth that Julie Robbins, one of the company's founders, ever expected when she and her husband, Paul, started Caribbean in 1993 after they both left another food shipper.

"We started out with nothing," she said. "The first couple of years, we were working for our lives."
At the beginning, all the couple had was a list of contacts, although they added two trucks to the business in 1995. Now, Caribbean boasts satellite offices across the country, a fleet of 40 trucks and contracts with a growing array of customers.

And it's a growth trend that Paul Robbins said isn't going to slow down.

In the near future, he said, much of that growth will come from Puerto Rico, which has long been an important market to Jacksonville. Much of the area's shipping industry, from the shipping lines that call here to the logistics companies that service them, have grown up on trade with the island.

Four shipping lines -- Crowley Liner Services, Horizon Lines, Sea Star Line and Trailer Bridge -- now carry goods between the First Coast and Puerto Rico, with more than 70 percent of all ocean-borne cargo that is shipped between the United States.

The merger will help Caribbean tap into even more of that market, Paul Robbins said, but the combined company expects to head into other waters as well. In fact, he said, the company hasn't yet settled on a name for the joint venture, partially because the executives are looking for one that would work as well in Asia as it does in waters closer to Florida.

Eagle's sister company, AJC International, sells meat in 140 other countries, and the merger with Eagle will allow Caribbean to tap into those economies as well, he said.

The company is also looking at other ventures. In March, Caribbean was certified as an export distributor for Yum! Brands Inc., the parent company behind KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Long John Silver's, making it one of only three U.S. companies that can distribute the franchise's products overseas.
Adding distribution -- actually buying and selling products -- to its core business of logistics -- moving stuff around -- will let Caribbean enter entirely new markets. And by piggybacking on AJC's activity around the globe, Caribbean will be able to extend its geographical reach as well.

"We want to take the business model we have in Puerto Rico and expand it to the rest of the world," Paul Robbins said. "We surround ourselves with the right people and do things for other companies that they can't. Moving something from point A to point B sounds awfully simple until you actually have to do it."