Peirone puts precision in its produce

The next time customers purchase a pound of bananas for the advertised 39 cents per pound from retailers like Rosauers, Super 1, Yoke's Fresh Market or Trading Company, consider the tender loving care - and expense - it took to make that fruit have its snappy yellow color on the table or kitchen counter.

Among other things, it took a $1 million investment in carefully climate-controlled coolers near the end of a six-week journey that took the fruit from tree to table.

Upon arrival from South or Central America at Peirone Produce's massive 78,000 square-foot warehouse on the West Plains - a trip that included both ship and truck - the load of green fruit is inspected, stored in special rooms and allowed to ripen.

Nine such rooms are devoted to bananas and three specifically to tomatoes.

Peirone sells about five trailer loads a week, or a million pounds a month from plants that yield just one crop.

"A lot of energy, a lot of expense," Mike Kamphaus, president and chief operating officer at Peirone, said. The end result is 2-3 days of retail shelf life and a similar number with the consumer.

The banana does not tolerate temperatures below 55 degrees for longer than three hours, Kamphaus explained.

A 30-year veteran of the produce business, Kamphaus said when people visit, they leave saying, "I can't believe they have to do all that to get a banana to the supermarket."

And that's just for one fruit. Similar coolers, all operated at different temperatures and humidity levels allow Peirone to offer the same attention to cherries, grapes, corn, lettuce or broccoli, just a fraction of nearly 1,000 individual items in the company inventory.

The company, founded 71 years ago by Joe Peirone and originally located on Trent Avenue in Spokane's University District, moved from a 29,000 square-foot building in 2010. Grocery wholesaler URM (United Retail Merchants) purchased the company in 1986. Kamphaus, who is from Boston, succeeded Pat Davidson as Peirone's CEO about two and-a-half years ago.

"Either in volume or square footage, we're the biggest in the market, we're the biggest in the Inland Northwest," Kamphaus said.

Peirone can deliver out-of-season crops like grapes, which first arrive from California in late May.

Several decades ago there were no grapes available in December, in the northwest Kamphaus explained. They are now because Peirone sources them out of South America or Africa." It's a world trade zone when it comes to fresh agriculture," he said.

Climate-controlled storage is just one of the innovative ways Peirone uses to provide produce to its customers, which also include collective groups such as Harvest Markets and Family Markets. The retail grocery customers make up over 90 percent of Peirone's volume. Other smaller niches include restaurants, schools and churches.

Safeway and Albertsons, now one company, along with Fred Meyer, owned nationally by Kroeger, all generally have their own produce operations. "They are well out of market," Kamphaus said, when it comes to produce offerings.

The company's most recent investment was made this year and is a warehouse management system. It allows Peirone to track every package that comes into the building and its destination.

"We have 100 percent traceability," Kamphaus said. "Oftentimes distributors have to recall everything because they don't know who got what."

Had a similar system been in place for a produce company in Colorado in 2011, perhaps it might have been much easier to trace listeria-contaminated cantaloupes linked to the deaths of 33 people.

Peirone employs 125 people and operates over two dozen tractor-trailer rigs that constantly travel to growing areas and deliver to customers in the region.

There's exactness and precision virtually everywhere in the company, except when it comes to pronouncing the Peirone name.

"It is commonly pronounced Peir-one with a long e but the family also went by the pronunciation of "Per-own," Kamphaus said. "I'm told Joe Peirone would answer the phone, 'Peirone,' with a long e," he added, so thus the confusion.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.