It used to take about a week to get fresh fruits and vegetables to stores in rural Alaska, but since late October, Alaska Commercial Company has been flying produce from Seattle to three stores in western Alaska communities.
The goal of the new program is to dramatically reduce transit time, said Kyle Hill, the president of the rural grocery chain.
“It's getting produce as quickly as possible, ideally, [the] next day from Seattle to the AC store,” Hill said. “Certainly, as fresh as Anchorage, maybe fresher than Anchorage in some cases.”
The company operates nearly 40 stores in rural Alaska. The new program is being tested at Alaska Commercial Company stores in Nome, Dillingham and King Salmon.
The company wouldn’t share how much the program costs, but Hill said it largely pencils out. Flying up fruits and veggies is much more expensive than barging them – but fresher produce increases sales, and means a lot less food waste.
“The offsetting factor there is we're not making more money on this, but we're not losing money on it,” Hill said. “If we're saving similar dollars on what we call shrink, which is a product that either spoils or doesn’t sell and you need to dispose of it, then the program works.”
The company partners with Northern Air Cargo for the deliveries.
They’re supposed to arrive in the communities the next-day a few times a week, but winter freight logistics in Alaska are challenging, and Hill said that during the program’s first few months, that target has been met about 65% of the time.
“We've had, in some cases, two, three, [or] four day delays, but it's still faster than it would have been if we would have put the berries or the bananas or the bagged salads on a container ship from Seattle to Anchorage,” he said.
Winter weather and airline maintenance recently led to bare shelves in Nome, but the company rushed to restock the store in days.
Produce is as fresh as what consumers can buy in Anchorage, Hill said.
Shipments include everything from bananas and berries, to zucchini and packaged salad. Rural residents, like Ashley Davis in Dillingham, are noticing an improvement in produce quality. On a recent Friday, Davis was at the store shopping for green peppers.
“We almost never have them, and there's lots of peppers in stock and vegetables, which is great, especially at the start of a year, and people are trying to eat healthy,” she said. “It's really nice to have the option of picking up stuff here fresh.”
Having access to fresh foods is something Davis said she worried about when she moved to the Bristol Bay town from Atlanta three years ago.
About 70 miles away in King Salmon, Lisa Anderson said fresh vegetables and fruits used to be few and far between. Now, it’s the opposite.
“When I go to Anchorage to see anybody, I'd always walk through the produce store just in awe,” Anderson said. “That's what it looks like when you go down and see them now here, it has just been phenomenal.”
She said her young grandchildren have been enjoying the variety of fruits, like pomegranates and asparagus.
In Nome, Janice Doherty agrees. She said her four granddaughters are wild about the berry and citrus options.
“The oldest likes to make lemonade with the fresh lemons,” Doherty said. “When we see that fresh produce here in Nome, we scoop it up and make fun things out of it."
Earlier this week, they decorated homemade cupcakes with fresh strawberries.
The majority of the food Alaskans eat is imported and access to fresh, affordable food is a struggle across much of the state.
Last year, Mike Jones, an economist with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, looked at how transportation issues impact food quality and availability in rural Alaska.
He found that spoilage rates are generally higher across the board in winter compared to summer, and that time and temperature are major factors.
“What really surprised me is you see about one in seven potatoes even get thrown away in the winter when they get to a certain village grocery store,” Jones said.
Jones said he’s excited to see how the new AC program plays out. For it to be successful, he said it’s crucial that these items get moved off the tarmac quickly, because freezing can be extremely damaging to fruits and veggies.
For example, bananas see higher spoilage rates in the winter because they’re sensitive – especially if they sit on the tarmac at very low temperatures.
The program is complex and involves lots of moving parts, but Hill, the president of Alaska Commercial Company, said the company is committed.
“We are so focused on fresh, healthy, nutritious food, because for a very long time, it's been hard to get that in rural Alaska – that we're going to make this work one way or another,” Hill said.
The company hopes to make the program permanent and expand it to more communities across the state.
