Quick International is always working to provide a new level of quality solutions and services to our customers with the intent of helping them meet all their critical shipping needs.
Visit our Newsroom regularly to stay current with our offerings, and our company.
- "When late Delivery Isn't an Option" Crain's NY Business.
- Read more
- Breast Milk Shipped to Africa to Help Feed Orphan Children.
- http://abcnews.go.com
- Quick steps up to breast milk project.
- http://www.stltoday.com
- Read more
INTERNATIONAL BREAST MILK PROJECT-
To provide donor breast milk for
babies in Africa orphaned by disease & poverty
June 20th, 2007
--Quick International Courier to Donate Shipping Services from U.S. to Orphanage in Africa --
MONROVIA, Calif. May 11, 2007 -- The International Breast Milk Project, the first organization in the world to provide donor breast milk from the United States to babies orphaned by disease and poverty, will be sending a shipment of donor breast milk to Durban, South Africa today, where it will be given to babies orphaned or abandoned as a result of HIV/AIDS.
The 5300 ounces of donated milk will be sent to the iThemba Lethu orphan home, a registered non-profit organization based in Durban, South Africa. iThemba Lethu supports children and young people whose futures are threatened by HIV/AIDS. The orphanage was sent a similar shipment in November 2006.
International Breast Milk Project, founded by Jill Youse, provides donor milk and funding from U.S. moms to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Africa. Since its inception, over 800 moms have applied to donate to the Breast Milk Project. The donated milk is collected by Prolacta Bioscience, which also conducts the testing and processing of the milk. The milk undergoes the most rigorous testing available in the world today, including at home blood testing of the donor mom. Prolacta donates all of their services to the International Breast Milk Project.
“Providing donor breast milk for babies who have been affected by the disease and poverty is incredibly rewarding,” said Jill Youse, founder of the International Breast Milk Project. “I am so pleased that organizations such as Quick and Prolacta, have stepped in to support our organization and our efforts.”
Quick International Courier, a global priority transportation organization, will be donating the shipping services from the US to South Africa. Due to the critical nature of this lifesaving shipment, it is imperative that it is treated with special care by cold chain transportation specialists, from pick up through to final delivery. The temperature must be monitored and maintained throughout transit and delivery time must be precise, especially to this remote part of the world, in order to ensure the viability of the breast milk.
Quick International became involved in this project, after Quick Account representative, Steve Zeiger watched a news story on the International Breast Milk Project. Zeiger immediately took action and began inquiring how his company could be involved and contribute to the cause.
Dominique C. Brown, Chief Operating Officer, Quick International Courier:
"We are very excited to be part of this process and to help support International Breast Milk Project’s mission by providing the transportation of human breast milk to orphans in Africa. This is such a personal and amazing gift that each mother is donating for these orphans. As a mother myself-I truly believe in the health benefits--and am touched by this unique expression of generosity. Our team will be working diligently to in order to deliver this temperature-sensitive shipment in pristine condition to these children"
About International Breast Milk Project
The International Breast Milk Project is the first organization in the world to provide donor breast milk from the United States to babies orphaned by disease and poverty. The first batch of donor milk arrived to the iThemba Lethu orphan home in April 2006. The organization was founded by Jill Youse and her brother Will Harlan. Over 800 moms have applied to donate to the Breast Milk Project. The organization has recently been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC World News and Time.com and several other leading publications. Visit www.breastmilkproject.org and click on ‘Newsworthy’ to see a full list of articles.
About Quick International Courier
Quick International Courier is the nation’s fastest growing, high-priority shipment specialist, offering mission-critical transportation solutions domestically and internationally. Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Quick provides unique services for critical and time-sensitive shipments, and delivers thousands of shipments daily, on a global basis. Quick's industry-focused teams handle everything from mission critical documents and packages, to perishable and high value items, to dangerous goods and more- all with the same care and precision. With a long history working in the area of life sciences, Quick is an integral part of lifesaving teams all around the world- delivering organs for transplant and vital medical devices, as well as the temperature and time sensitive specimens and investigational drugs necessary for successful clinical trials. Quick International Courier is headquartered in New York City, with offices located throughout the United States and internationally.
About Prolacta
Prolacta BioScience (www.prolacta.com) is a life science company dedicated to the application of science relating to human milk - one of nature’s most complex and valuable substances. Prolacta is the pioneer in human milk-based nutritional products for critically-ill or premature infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It has created the first and only commercially available Human Milk Fortifier made from 100% human milk, Prolact-Plus™. With this breakthrough development, Prolacta has made a commitment to improving neonatal nutrition. Using state of the art formulation, pasteurization and filling processes, Prolacta ensures the highest possible level of product safety and quality. The company operates a pharmaceutical grade processing plant and has designed and patented processes unique to the science of human milk. Prolacta is committed to supporting research in the areas of human milk and premature infant nutrition in order to assist health care professionals in providing the best possible care for the most fragile babies.
- NEWSDAY - Shipping firm seizes chances
Richard Galant
Money & Power- www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzgalant5242394jun04,0,7958783,print.column?coll=ny-business-print
- June 4, 2007
- Bob Mitzman rushes into the elevator, perspiring from a 10-block walk on a stiflingly hot spring day in Manhattan. He introduces himself and explains that he had dashed out to buy a pair of running shoes and get back in time for a 1 p.m. interview.
- He made it.
- Mitzman knows the value of being on time. In fact, the Old Westbury resident's business is handling "the most time-critical shipments that there are."
- Human organs for transplant, umbilical cords on their way to labs, parts for grounded aircraft - these are some of the things that Quick International Courier ships as part of its $150-million-a-year operation.
- The 52-year-old chief executive with a gruff New York accent and an informal manner doesn't show the pressure that you might expect comes with such a business that he says has to be "mistake-free" in handling shipments.
- "We have to get every single one of them right," he says. "Of course, there will be delays, we expect planes will get rerouted, tires will go flat, drivers will have heart attacks ... sooner or later all of these contingencies will happen, and they have."
- The key is reacting quickly to salvage the job. In December, when 2 feet of snow shut down Denver's airport for nearly two days, the company had to charter extra planes to make a critical shipment.
- If Quick International had stuck to its original business model of shipping documents, Mitzman would be out of business by now instead of building a new corporate headquarters near Kennedy Airport.
- A talk with him highlights how a company has to search for new markets to survive in the fast-changing economy.
- Mitzman, a graduate of Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside and Northeastern University, got fired from his first full-time job as a salesman for a big courier company, World Courier.
- He recalls being very happy there as a young man who got the opportunity to go on trips to Tehran and Buenos Aires as a courier. "I loved it, so when they fired me, I didn't want to leave the industry."
- In 1981, with an initial investment of $15,000, he struck a deal to partner with a Pennsylvania entrepreneur, James Armour, who ran a company called Quick Messenger.
- Courier companies made money in those days by shipping financial documents around the world. Speedy shipping was crucial to banks that needed to move letters of credit and other documents that could be turned into cash.
- Mitzman gained an advantage by doing a deal with Freddie Laker, the British airline pioneer who spearheaded deregulation in the industry.
- Laker let Mitzman's company put a courier on his trans-Atlantic flights with 1,000 pounds of extra baggage. The price: one $160-passenger fare. Unlike other airlines,
- Laker didn't ship cargo. "So he had the space, anyway, and he was happy to sell the seat," Mitzman says.
- T
- hat meant Mitzman's effective cost to ship was 16 cents a pound, compared to the $4 a pound charged by other airlines. Laker's airline didn't last long, but it gave Mitzman a foothold in the industry.
- Gaining a healthy share of the document shipping business was no guarantee of success in the long term. By the late 1980s, companies were handling more transactions electronically rather than through shipments of paper.
- Fortunately for Mitzman, who became the principal owner after Armour retired, there were other opportunities. When a plane is grounded for mechanical reasons, the quick arrival of a key part can keep an airline from having to cancel a flight. Quick and its competitors targeted that business.
- Other industries also began to rely on critical shipments to keep their production moving. "When you do that, you start to find that 'wow, if I'm off a little bit, if I run out of this chemical, everything stops,'" Mitzman says.
- Quick's expansion was fueled by the 1997 acquisition of Sterling Courier Systems, a Virginia-based company that specializes in shipping aviation parts and organs for transplant. Roger Brown, who manages the organ center at the United Network for Organ Sharing in Richmond, Va., says Sterling is one of two companies handling such shipments nationwide. "It's very time-sensitive, and Sterling understands that," Brown says.
- A donated liver needs to be implanted within 12 hours, he says. That means a courier company can take no more than eight hours to complete the shipment. Sterling has gotten airlines to delay flights so they could carry an organ, he says, and, in snowstorms that grounded flights, Sterling has had couriers "drive six or eight hours up the coast with a kidney to make that transplant happen."
- All of the initiatives couldn't insulate Mitzman's company from the shock of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "On 9/12, all of our flights were grounded," he recalls. "All of our clients were totally out, they were dysfunctional. We had shipments that we were responsible for stuck in airports all over the world."
- Sept. 11 was a watershed that led people in virtually every industry to rethink their business. Before the attacks, Quick was still getting nearly a third of its business from shipping documents. Today, Mitzman estimates that it accounts for less than 10 percent of revenues. "We had legacy clients that were using us from the early 1980s that all of a sudden woke up and said, 'Why should I use this?'" They switched to sending documents electronically.
- The company lost money for a year, he says, before getting back on a growth curve. Now, Mitzman is targeting the growing field of international shipments for drug companies doing clinical trials around the world.
- Others also serve this market - including Mitzman's former employer, World Courier, which says it has more than 140 offices around the world.
- Quick is a smaller company, with 14 offices in the United States with about 500 employees and an office in the United Kingdom with about 100 employees. It opened a Singapore office last year and plans further expansion while also using agents around the world who are not Quick employees.
- "We're up against some big challenges," Mitzman says. "We have to build out our international infrastructure to be a viable player with the big pharma companies. It's exciting, it's doable, that's what's jazzing me up more than anything else right now."
- There's a clue in Mitzman's 18th-floor office, overlooking Fifth Avenue, to another thing that gets him jazzed - a guitar. A lifelong music fan, Mitzman plays in a band.
- Encouraging his team to balance their lives by pursuing their personal interests, he began a company sales conference last year in Arizona by showing his band's music video.
- The band's name, Only in America, comes with a story.
- "We play at parties," he says. "More often than not, we are the party." He says he is friends with Clarence Clemons, the saxophone player best known for his key role in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.
- "When Clarence comes to visit, I make him play with us," Mitzman says. Aside from touring the world with Springsteen, Clemons has starred with his own band and played with some of America's biggest rock and soul artists. He has appeared in movies and on television.
- So when Clemons plays with Mitzman and his amateur buddies, "Clarence says this could only happen in America."
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.- Delivering Life -- Fast Courier Firm Specializes in Organ Shipments
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 11, 2003; Page E01
- By Martha McNeil Hamilton
- On the medical desk at Sterling Courier Systems in Herndon last week, Kathy McNally and David Rentz shuffled through orders, kept their eyes on computer screens showing airline takeoffs and arrivals, and answered a steady stream of phone calls as they tracked the progress of lifesaving shipments.
Sterling Courier handles about 75 medical shipments a day -- kidneys, lungs, livers, corneas, heart valves and tissue being delivered from recently diseased donors to medical centers or tissue banks -- from its 24-hour operations center in an office park just off Herndon Parkway. The same-day-delivery courier company was founded in October 1985 by Glenn Smoak and Dennis Wright, both of whom had worked at Sky Courier, said Vice President Bob Rinaldi. Rinaldi, another Sky Courier veteran, started Sterling's sales department a few months after the company opened for business. Medical shipments are a major specialty for Sterling but not the only cargo that it rushes from city to city. The company also ships parts to airlines stranded on runways and rushes football game highlights to television networks. In a carpeted corner of the space outside Rinaldi's office, two crates full of spare parts for equipment operated by the federal Transportation Security Administration sit waiting to be shipped instantly to any airport where they may be needed.
When the call volume is heavy, calls spill over to other desks that supplement what McNally and Rentz are doing to ensure that no valuable minutes slip by. "This is a kidney we've picked up," said McNally looking at an order form and keeping an eye on the computer screen. So far no matching recipient had been lined up, but to ensure the fastest delivery once that happens, "they'd rather have it in our hands," said McNally.
In its first year, the company grew to just under $1 million in sales and continued to grow to a sales volume of more than $30 million in 1998. That was the year it was acquired by a larger courier company, Quick International, headquartered in New York. Quick decided to maintain Sterling's corporate identity "as the stronger brand because people know them" because of Sterling's experience in medical shipments, said Quick Vice President Maria Vigliarolo. Quick is a privately held company with a single principal stockholder and approximately $100 million in business, she said.
Nationwide the express courier business is about a $4 billion industry with 4,000 to 5,000 companies, said Bob DeCaprio, executive director of the Messenger Courier Association of the Americas. The companies range from cab companies to larger operations such as Sterling's.
Sterling is the primary courier for the United Network for Organ Sharing, which administers the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network established by Congress. "They're experienced with moving organs. They know what needs to be done and how to do it," said Anne Paschke, a spokeswoman for the organsharing network.
The company, which has 80 employees, doesn't operate its own aircraft. It relies on a network of couriers and commercial flights for most of its deliveries. When McNally or Rentz receive a call from an organ-transplant coordinator alerting them to the prospect that an organ will be available from a donor who has just died or is near death, they immediately alert a courier in the area where the donation is occurring. At the beginning of the process, the nationwide network that determines where organs will go may not know yet where it will be sent. As soon as the destination is determined, Sterling's medical desk searches for the first available commercial flight between the two points.
The courier at the shipping point will rush the organ from the medical center to the flight, where it will travel in the cockpit or the forward cabin -- Sterling is notified of the organ's exact placement on the aircraft. Then the flight is given "lifeguard" status, giving it priority for takeoff, air space and landing rights.
Sometimes it may be faster for the courier to drive the donated organ from one medical center to the other -- especially after Sept. 11, 2001, when airlines have made it harder to put cargo on board at the last minute, said McNally. Sterling's couriers, contractors that may be individuals or taxi companies, all have been cleared by Sterling's own security, by the airlines and most recently by the TSA, said Rinaldi, and all its callers requesting shipments also are known by the company.
On Friday, McNally was making sure a kidney traveling from St. Louis to Los Angeles made its connection in Denver. In another case, though, Sterling elected to have a courier drive from Birmingham to Atlanta with heart valves and vessels needed for surgery in early afternoon. When planes were grounded by the East Coast blizzard in February, courier Tony Preechacheah drove from Fairfax to deliver a liver needed by a 3-year-old girl in Newark, N.J., while two other couriers battled through the night to make what normally is a few hours' drive to deliver a kidney to a patient in Livingston, Pa.
To make sure that nothing inteferes with Sterling's ability to handle its shipments, the operations center has backup systems. For instance, all the computer equipment is attached to batteries that can keep going for four to six hours if need be, said David Leake, director of corporate facilties. Since the company also has a natural gas generator that kicks in in seven seconds if the power goes down, the batteries are unlikely to be put to the test. The company's phone system can be switched to other facilities in New York or Chicago at the touch of a button if the offices had to be vacated, he said.
Everything the company handles has a specific time when it has to arrive, Rinaldi said. "Everything we do here is critical."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
- Their most special delivery
Dogged couriers brave blizzard to bring transplant patient a kidney
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
BY GABRIEL H. GLUCK
Star-Ledger Staff
As Robert Heuser waited for the kidney that could save his life, Zack Fonseca was fighting his way through a blizzard, trying to bring it to him.
What should have been a few hours' drive from Philadelphia to Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston turned into a night-long marathon for Fonseca, a medical courier who agreed to attempt the delivery despite the Presidents Day storm.
Along the way, his tire chains snapped, his alternator failed, his windshield wipers and headlights faltered, and he found himself sticking his head out the window to see the road ahead.
"If it was anything but a human organ, I wouldn't have even considered it," said Fonseca, who eventually handed off to a second courier.
Meanwhile, the transplant surgeon was making his own trek, heading to the hospital on foot because his car was snowed in.
No one told Heuser about the difficulties until his surgery was complete.
"I'm glad I didn't know -- at least until it was over," Heuser said late last week, sitting in his hospital room and "feeling great."
Heuser, 58, from Winfield Park, is thankful for the efforts of everyone involved, from the family of the donor to the couriers and to the medical staff. "I applaud them," he said.
Heuser and his wife were in Lancaster, Pa., the Sunday before Presidents Day when they were notified that a donor kidney was available. They ran into the early stages of the blizzard as they headed to Livingston. "It took us an hour to go one exit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike," Heuser said.
That evening, the call came to Sterling Courier, which handles about 10,000 emergency medical shipments a year, of the need to bring the kidney from Philadelphia to Saint Barnabas. By then, Philadelphia International Airport was closed.
"These are all life-and-death situations," said Bob Rinaldi, a founder of Sterling Courier. "Whether we bring in a helicopter, a charter aircraft, whatever we need to do, it's got to be done. And we always find a way to get through."
This time, the road was the only way. Fonseca, heading home to Philadelphia in his 1994 Isuzu Rodeo after a trip to Allentown, got the call. "I was one of the last couriers on the road that night," he said.
As he headed up the snow-coated New Jersey Turnpike, the chains on his right rear tire snapped just north of Bellmawr. Ten miles later, the left rear chain snapped.
Sometimes he could get up to 30 mph, "but that was as fast as I could do. I hugged the center of the road." For a time he trailed a convoy of snowplows moving at about 20 mph. He worried that if the kidney did not get to the hospital in time, it would be useless.
"I tried to block it out of my head," he said. "I thought, 'What if it were my kid?' And that was all the motivation I needed."
By the time he reached the Garden State Parkway, his windshield wipers were slowing down, the radio had gone quiet and his headlights were dimming. "The voltmeter was reading 10 volts and falling and this is 4:30 in the morning and there's no one out there," he said. "I had my head hanging out the window so I could see."
Fonseca made his way to Morris Avenue in Union Township, where he saw the lights on at a bagel shop. As he coasted to a stop in front of the shop, he heard his alternator belt squealing. Moments later it snapped.
Union police took him the last few miles to the Springfield lab where the final testing had to be done to assure the kidney would be compatible. There was still the matter of getting the kidney to Saint Barnabas.
So a second courier, Mohamed Taki Dhalla, was dispatched to the lab. "It was very bad. The weather was very bad," Dhalla said. "But I had to do it."
So Dhalla set off in his 1984 Honda Accord. He got stuck in the snow three times and had to dig himself out, finally reaching the hospital after two and a half hours.
Meanwhile, the transplant surgeon, Stephen Guy, could not get his car past the wall of snow in front of his Livingston house, so he walked the mile and a half to the medical center.
Guy said he wasn't too worried about the delay in transporting the kidney. "I just assumed it was going to take six to eight hours," he said. If the couriers hadn't made it to the hospital by late Monday afternoon, then he would have been concerned.
But the kidney was such a perfect match that Guy was confident everything would come together. Of the more than 200 kidney transplants performed at the hospital last year, only about five were perfect matches, he said.
"Basically, you won the lottery," Guy told his patient.
