Starbucks is the latest retail giant to charter ships for bespoke voyages as liner shipping fails to serve its logistical needs.
Operational sources told TradeWinds the Seattle-based roaster and brewer recently found its huge US east coast roaster at York in Pennsylvania running short of beans, thanks to constraints on global liner trades.
For want of space on container ships, Starbucks went to the length of chartering a multipurpose (MPP) carrier better suited to industrial cargoes for a load of green coffee beans that different sources place at between 250 teu and 450 teu.
The Dutch-controlled, 10,500-dwt MPP vessel Symphony Star (built 2015) loaded the beans at Santa Marta in Colombia and departed on 20 January for Baltimore, where it discharged a week later. Baltimore is about an hour’s drive by truck from the giant Starbucks roaster.
Officials of Starbucks were not immediately available for comment on the company’s further shipping plans. According to a company website, the Pennsylvania plant roasts some 3m pounds of beans per week.
The Symphony Star is commercially managed by Groningen-based Forestwave Navigation and owned by Dutch-controlled, Singapore-based Symphony Ventures.
Forestwave chartering boss Evert Versfelt told TradeWinds the ship was in range for the Starbucks business after delivering a load of steel pipe in Ecuador.
He added that Forestwave does not do much containerised business or much time-chartering out, but in the tight current market it has found opportunities to do business with a container line.
“Our fleet is of MPP geared tweendeckers with ice class, but in recent months we have occasionally fixed out a ship for a few months to container liner operators,” he said.
Forestwave’s fleet of about 50 owned, managed or chartered MPP carriers has been expanding its range of late from its normal Baltic-Mediterranean-Black Sea trading pattern and becoming more of an Atlantic operator, Versfelt told TradeWinds. That put the Symphony Star in range for the coffee bean business.
But it was German-based MPP major BBC Chartering as time charterer of the vessel that contracted with Starbucks, and Forestwave did not know who the end-user was until it saw the bill of lading.
A BBC official in Houston did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but chartering sources told TradeWinds that BBC has been involved as operator in several of the recent non-traditional ad hoc charters to end-users.
Port of Baltimore executive director William Doyle was unwilling to comment on specifics of the voyages but told TradeWinds that such charters are “a wake-up call to the liner industry”.
“We’ve had over 40 ad hoc ship calls with containers just at Baltimore since July 2020,” Doyle said.
TradeWinds has reported on a series of chartering and even newbuilding deals done direct between traditional liner shipping customers and shipowners or shipbuilders.
Most recently Shenzhen-listed manufacturer Loctek ordered for its own use a single 1,800-teu container ship for a reported $32.6m from Huanghai Shipbuilding.
Previously companies including Ikea, Walmart, Costco and Home Depot have chartered container ships directly, and soft drink giant Coca-Cola has chartered bulk carriers for palletised cargoes of artificial sweeteners that would normally have shipped in boxes.
