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In a move that ignited his business, Mike Cara quit making deliveries for wholesalers at New York's Fulton Fish Market and began to concentrate on delivering to those same wholesalers.
Starting in 1979, he made store deliveries from vendors on the market. It didn't take too long to discover that the best trucking business was going into the market, not out. To get into the inbound business, he began buying crabs and selling them to market wholesalers. Cara also hauled fish into the market to help increase revenue.
"The size of the fleet varied in those days, depending on how much volume we had," Cara says. "Our basic equipment was two used vans. After a while, we began looking at the idea of delivering frozen food as a way to smooth out the workflow. The idea worked, and in 1982, we bought our first refrigerated truck. From that point forward, we had a strong presence delivering to those seafood wholesalers. We operated as M Cara Seafood Transport, and ran four trucks from 1990 to 2000."
Partnership with growing warehouse
Although the company remained small for 10 years, it took a step in 1990 that provided the key to its current size; Cara entered a 50/50 partnership with Preferred Warehouse. Operating as MCST Preferred Transportation, the company became the transportation arm of the warehouse system, which now has nine facilities nationwide with two more ready to come on stream by June 2002. Preferred Warehouse has changed its name to Preferred Freezer Services and has grown to four warehouses in New Jersey serving the New York metro area, two in Miami, Florida, and three in Los Angeles. The two new warehouses are being built in New Jersey.
Preferred Freezer Services is a general public refrigerated warehouse chain that aims its primary services at the very same target as MCST Preferred Transportation. Both companies focus on a narrow, but lucrative niche of the food business - expensive frozen seafood. "Notice that all the warehouses are in port cities," Cara says. "Other public warehouses don't really like the extra handling and risk associated with frozen seafood."
In addition to the construction going on for Preferred Freezer Services, MCST is about to complete a 90,000-sq-ft freight handling facility of...