Nogales testing ‘superlot’ inspections during Mexico grape season

A pilot program in Nogales, Ariz., at the Mariposa Port of Entry, should speed up some inspections of Mexico grapes this season.

Greg Ibach, under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, explained how the program works.

“(In the past) ... single trucks that would maybe be one truck after the other that were uniform — from the same grower, the same type of grape, the same packaging — we would treat those as individual shipments,” Ibach said. “Now if they’re (the) same grower, same packaging, same grape and there’s three trucks of them in a row, we can count them as one lot.”

Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, said the use of “superlots” cuts down on time and paperwork.

“If you’re doing an inspection of one truckload of grapes, it takes the average inspector a range of 45 minutes to a little over an hour,” Jungmeyer said. “If you do a superlot, it doesn’t take three hours. It might be an hour and a half or something like that, so there’s big time savings.”

Nogales got some experience with superlots in 2017, when the USDA and the Arizona Department of Agriculture agreed to allow them on a de facto emergency basis because of a work stoppage among inspectors.

“It worked so well, we said, ‘Can we do this again in the future?’” Jungmeyer said.

The inspiration for the change in procedure came from the way ocean shipments are inspected.

“In Philadelphia there were customs (officers) doing grape inspections ... that equaled out to about three or four truckloads worth of grapes,” Jungmeyer said. “So they said, ‘Well if you can do that in Philadelphia, why not for land ports of entry?’”

The change also allows for better use of warehouse space in Nogales, Jungmeyer said.

Ibach met with FPAA members and visited a joint USDA-Arizona Department of Agriculture inspection facility April 26.