(TNS) — Every Wednesday starting July 9, two new freight ships, Copan and Quetzal, will alternate docking at Holt Logistics LLC’s Gloucester City terminal, unloading apparel from Central American factories and fruit from farms, and picking up auto parts and other U.S. products for export to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The largest U.S.-based ocean shipping company, Crowley Corp., has added what it calls the first Philadelphia-Central America direct service in response to rising demand, said Reinier van Delden, vice president of commercial operations for Crowley’s logistics unit.

Gloucester City, just across the Delaware from South Philadelphia, “is a great location, right off the interstate highways, with proximity to markets, deep-water assets, and cold storage,” van Delden said.

Crowley had been seeking to add Philadelphia to its Central American service to Jacksonville, Fla., and Wilmington, N.C., even before the Trump administration raised tariffs on goods imported from China and other major U.S. trading partners, he said.

The Copan and the Quetzal, ships built at Hyundai’s Ulsan shipyard in South Korea and fueled by liquefied natural gas at a Crowley terminal in Florida, “are bigger and faster, so we could add another port” farther north, and the company chose Philadelphia, van Delden said.

Crowley also moves cargoes between New York and Philadelphia area docks and Puerto Rico, and between Florida’s Port Everglades and the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

There are signs that U.S. imports from the northern Central America countries are on the rise. For example, Fanatics, the team-gear distributor owned by Philadelphia-based Michael Rubin, reported buying products from 22 plants in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as of April, up from 14 in August 2024, while buying from fewer plants in China, Mexico, and Canada.

Leaders of U.S. and Central American lobbying groups such as HUGE have advocated for “near shoring” products that can’t be profitably produced in the United States from low-wage and low-cost Latin American nations, instead of shipping them from distant East Asia, the world’s manufacturing center.

The Holt family’s cold-storage warehouses and shipping systems in Gloucester City were a special attraction for bananas, melons, okra, cucumbers, plantains, sugar, coffee, and other farm produce shipped from Guatemala’s Santo Tomás de Castilla port, Crawley officials said.

“The Holts really rolled out the red carpet for us,” van Delden said.

Leo Holt, an owner of the Holt port enterprises, which operate terminals in Philadelphia as well as South Jersey, called Crowley “a very long-term and dynamic family business” and a natural partner for his family-owned company.

The spread of retail fulfillment-center warehouses across the Northeast has boosted demand for sources closer than Asia, van Delden said.

He noted that the new ships, owned by Israeli businessman Idan Ofer’s Singapore-based Eastern Pacific line and leased to Crowley, can cross the Caribbean and the U.S. South Atlantic coast in five or six days, compared to the 30-day journey from East Asia, which can leave importers more vulnerable to supply disruptions.

Each ship can carry the equivalent of 700 40-foot trailer loads, or 300 refrigerated containers.

Puerto Cortés in Honduras ships exports from clothing makers and other factories in nearby San Pedro Sula and the capital, Tegucigalpa, as well as Nicaragua to the south.

Santo Tomás de Castilla, built as a terminal for bananas and other farm produce, can also handle industrial exports to the U.S. East Coast from the Guatemala City area and from neighboring El Salvador, whose ports are on the Pacific.

Philadelphia is the largest U.S. fruit port, collecting grapes from Chile, apples from Argentina, mangoes from Colombia, and many other products to Wilmington and other terminals. Some of the port produce is trucked to the Philadelphia Produce Terminal in Southwest Philadelphia for sale to store chains across the region.

With sales of around $2.6 billion last year, family-owned Crowley is the largest U.S.-based shipping company. Like other U.S. lines, Crowley focuses on shipping to U.S. ports under federal Jones Act restrictions designed to protect U.S. shipbuilders and seamen’s unions.

Crowley and other U.S. shippers such as West Coast-focused Matson are a fraction of the size of Europe-based global giants such as APG-Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, or Asian leaders such as China’s Cosco and Taiwan-based Evergreen Group.

The Trump administration, backed by Democrats in Congress, is seeking to increase subsidizes to U.S.-based shipyards, including the Hanwha (previously Aker) Philadelphia shipyard at the former Navy Yard, in a bid to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign-built ships and the world’s general dependence on ships built in China, the main U.S. strategic rival.