Pilot bread and Alaska transportation.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Transportation

Christy Inman of Bethel likes pilot read with peanut butter and jelly, but she'll often eat the tasty crackers right out of the box. A man standing near Inman at her store, Corina's Case Lot Groceries, says he likes to spread them with butter and put them in the microwave for ten seconds until the butter melts.

The elders eat pilot bread with bacon fat. Salmon is another favorite topping, and pilot bread makes an excellent sandwich with moose burger. Some people top pilot bread with Crisco and sugar or ice cream and chocolate syrup.

Pilot bread is a beloved staple food in Alaska. The large round crackers have an extraordinarily long shelf life and can be found in stores and homes all over Alaska. There are several brands, but by far the most popular comes in a bright blue box imprinted with a cherubic boy wearing a jaunty sailor's outfit.

Sailor Boy Pilot Bread is made in only one place: an Interbake Foods LLC factory in Richmond, Virginia, which started making the crackers in 1919. Alaskans eat almost all of the pilot bread manufactured there, about three hundred thousand boxes annually. Now consider the fact that 82 percent of Alaska communities lack road access.

Getting it from the factory on the Atlantic coast to the table of an elder in rural Alaska is a logistical challenge that can include trucks and trains, boats, barges, and planes covering thousands of miles in the face of some of the world's worst weather.

Pilot Bread's Journey

Here's how it happens: After coming by rail and truck from a factory in Virginia to a port in Oregon, the first stop for a typical shipment of pilot bread is a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse owned by the Alaska Commercial Company at the Port of Tacoma. "We are the number one supplier of pilot bread in the world," says Waker Pickett, general manager and vice president of operations for the Alaska Commercial Company.

The Puget Sound region has been the hub for Alaska commerce since the 1800s. Almost all goods destined for the Alaska market travel through Seattle or Tacoma, adding $4 billion to the regional economy and tens of thousands of jobs, according to a 2004 study. Seventy-five percent of all cargo that comes into Alaska via ship goes through the Port of Tacoma.

At the Alaska Commercial Company warehouse a complex routing and handling system is in place to accomplish what on the surface is a seemingly simple delivery of pilot bread to a village store, says Bob Cain, vice president of logistics for Alaska Commercial Company

"The story about our freight service in Alaska is...