Pompeian VP Says Baltimore Bridge Disaster Cost Company Millions

The col­lapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on the morn­ing of March 26^th has had an esti­mated finan­cial impact of mil­lions of dol­lars on bot­tler and dis­trib­u­tor Pompeian, accord­ing to the company’s vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions.

Salim Benjelloun told WJZ News, a CBS affil­i­ate, that a ship­ment of nearly 5.3 mil­lion liters of olive oil, sched­uled to arrive on March 27^th, had to be rerouted.

“We needed 300,000 gal­lons (1.13 mil­lion liters) to be dis­charged sooner rather than later so that the qual­ity of our prod­uct would not be impacted, our employ­ees would be pro­tected and oper­a­tions would not be inter­rupted,” Benjelloun said.

While some of the olive oil was offloaded at a sec­tion of the port that was not impacted by the bridge col­lapse, the rest had to be rerouted to the port of New York and brought down to the Baltimore facil­ity in trucks, a 310-kilo­me­ter jour­ney that takes more than three hours and added con­sid­er­able expense.

“We’re talk­ing mil­lions of dol­lars; we’re not talk­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands in terms of finan­cial impacts,” Benjelloun said.

Pompeian, based in Baltimore for over 100 years, is the largest olive oil bot­tler in the United States. The com­pany imports olive oil from nine coun­tries and pro­duces olive oil from 425 hectares of groves in California. However, the lion’s share comes from the Mediterranean.

“We are the num­ber one brand of olive oil with over 21 per­cent mar­ket share in the United States,” Mouna Aissaoui, Pompeian’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent and chief oper­at­ing offi­cer, told WYPR.

“We have always con­sid­ered the port of Baltimore an exten­sion of our oper­a­tions and a strong asset for us,” she added. ​“We bring olive oil from around the world through the port of Baltimore in ship­ping con­tain­ers… Then we bring the oil to our fac­tory, where it is fil­tered, blended and bot­tled to be dis­trib­uted through­out the United States.”

Before the col­lapse, caused by a cargo ship col­lid­ing with the bridge, the port of Baltimore was one of the top 20 ports in the U.S. In 2023, an esti­mated $73 mil­lion of oilseeds, includ­ing olive oil, passed through the port.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the coun­try imported 360,700 tons of olive oil worth $2.2 bil­lion in 2023.

Some por­tions of the main port have reopened to larger ships, and Pompeian suc­cess­fully imported a ship­ment from the most recent har­vest in Europe. The port will not return to full capac­ity until mid-June.

“We fully and heav­ily rely on the port of Baltimore. We’re in Baltimore because of the port,” Benjelloun said. ​“With every­thing that hap­pened in the port of Baltimore, we’re not back­ing away from that. If any­thing, we’ve seen that in a worst-case sce­nario, we were still able to man­age.”

However, Aissaoui con­firmed that the com­pa­ny’s strat­egy, while effec­tive, was finan­cially unsus­tain­able over the long term.

“The amount of money we were invest­ing [in the solu­tions that we put in place] was not some­thing we could do for a con­tin­u­ous amount of time,” she said.

• CBS News
• WYPR