How can foodservice and retail buyers meet this demand when there are many components to consider with their fresh produce orders such as sourcing, pick-ups from grower/producers, filling trucks, and all the miles from grower to the final drop. We have found that a consolidation strategy is what makes it possible for buyers to shop for and not avoid seasonal, LTL, and specialty buys. In fact, this strategy worked well for a national grocer that prides themselves on providing their shoppers with plethora of produce options and saved them $3.5 million a year in the process.
First, let’s go over the basics of LTL, Seasonal, Specialty buys!
LTL
Less than load (LTL) means that you are shipping your produce without filling up an entire truck. With your produce buys, there may be certain high-volume items that can fill a truck. Its unlikely that 100% of the time your orders allow you to fill 100% of a truck. The variability of produce purchasing makes the odds of that impossible! So buyers are often sending out too many trucks and trucks that aren’t completely full. Each truck has costs tied to it and so every square foot of space is costly.
The ability to use LTL freight becomes a game changer. Consolidation makes this possible because we are optimizing load, routes, and cadence— in any given week we have 500 LTL Refrigerated Routes going out to 32 states!
Seasonal
Now, consumers have some understanding about seasonality of produce, but as our supply chain expands and grows, that understanding is disappearing. The history of produce shows this with the freight innovations that brought bannanas from tropical regions to North America. California growers started packing railroad cars full of ice to ship lettuce across the country. Those were our beginnings, and we are at a point where we can’t access produce that ordinally can’t grow in certain regions during certain times of the year.
So seasonality is taking on a new meaning, more of peak production and quality seasonality. This is where buys can and should take advantage of sourcing during the peaks of these seasons in the optimal growing regions. This is where we have consolidation facilities across the country to take advantage of these optimal growing regions.
Specialty
Last is our specialty category. Not all buyers may need this, but some restaurants are differentiating their menus with non-traditional ingredients. Or home chefs may search for specialty produce in the grocery story to make the irresistible recipe they say on a Facebook Reel or Instagram Story (don’t worry, we doom scroll at night too).
The reality is that variety is going to be a critical purchase strategy to keep up with competition in the foodservice and retail worlds. This is where we work to build a large grower network, over 100 in fact, so that you can find the right specialty item.
How it Comes Together to Build Variety
Consolidation is the magic that allows any type of LTL, and as you can see seasonal and specialty purchases often don’t fill a truck like your higher volume produce items. But buyers need these purchases to stay relevant and competitive with consumer demand. This is where a consolidation team can step in to make recommendations on best in season purchases, help you source specialty growers, and then put your LTL orders on the right refrigerated route.
The key to building variety in your purchasing programs comes from the advantage consolidation brings to the supply chain. It’s simple, consolidators are forming a network of resources, so the more buyers that consolidate, the more scale we can build, and with scale there is more variety, more LTL access, more routes, and with scale comes better margins for everyone. Classic economics of making a bigger pie so that we all get a slice.
