As a grocer, food purveyor or foodservice provider, you know that if you don't deliver the freshest food in the safest manner and shortest time possible – with built-in cost efficiencies to boot – you're going to have some pretty unhappy customers. And customer expectations are increasing all the time.

There's a call for longer product shelf life, a consumer demand for the freshest offerings and a growing desire to know exactly where food came from. There's also a need, driven by multiple sources – including the Food Safety Modernization Act – to provide transparency and monitoring of every product from the moment it's harvested until it reaches the consumer's plate.

These are some tall orders, and the pressure is only increasing. But there is good news, and it comes in the form of a refined combination of human expertise and advanced cold chain technologies.

How Do You Ensure Fresh Foods Arrive as Planned?

It's all about process, procedure and reliability. Leveraging the right level of technology is key to creating efficiencies.

When you have reliable equipment, a checks-and-balances procedure, and a firm cold chain process in place, your goal of getting your product where it needs to go – safely, on time and in the least costly manner possible – is definitely within reach.

Technological Innovations

• Real-time tracking using GPS technology provides accurate temperature monitoring
• Active monitoring adjusts temperature if there is a fluctuation
• Passive monitoring provides a report at the end of the trip
• Bar code inventory tracking systems – down to the item level
• RFID devices that can be embedded into pallets or individual items

Technology in the Trailer

• Properly- insulated containers
• The right reefer unit for the job
• Proper use of bulkheads, chutes and venting
• Quality equipment: emissions-compliant trailers for optimum fuel- and cost-efficiency

Human Capital

• Committed training of personnel and drivers
• Firm grasp of proper loading techniques
• Ability to use the available cold chain technology to its fullest capacity

Looking for help? Here are some questions to ask a prospective leasing, transportation or logistics provider:

• How do I ensure my reefers are properly maintained?
• What innovations can I employ to extend product shelf life?
• How can I ensure my products do not carry food-borne illness?
• How do I handle reverse logistics?
• How do I configure my supply chain to maintain the visibility required for recalls?
• What measures can I take to ensure I am FSMA-compliant?
• How can I make the most efficient use of product transportation?
• How can I incorporate warehousing into my transportation solution?
• What tools can I use to determine product conditions during transit?
• How do I avoid temperature fluctuations or other temperature-related events?
• What precautions do I need to take in order to avoid product spoilage?
• What tools are available to identify waste in time and costs through the delivery process?

Getting cold foods where they need to go in a timely, cost-effective and safe manner requires creating a supply chain where every link is secure and efficient. The more you establish a system of reliable checks and balances, the better your outcomes will be – and the more satisfied and confident your customers will become.

How Penske Transportation Solutions Can Help

We have a team of experts ready to help you find the best solutions for your food and beverage needs, including commercial rental trucks and reefers, vehicle leases, logistics services and used trucks.

Today's busy customers demand fresher, more appealing offerings from their grocers and convenience stores. To meet these needs, shippers must guarantee that deliveries will be on time, with built-in flexibility to respond when volumes spike.

To improve operations, shippers can utilize a mix of technology, equipment and expertise to leverage the supply chain, which works to reduce spoilage, offer a wider range of items than they may have had in the past and provide the freshest food products possible, and as a result, focus on their core competencies and better compete within the marketplace.

Maximize Your Food Supply Chain

1. Develop a Separate Cold Supply Chain

Freshness drives the food business. To accelerate that freshness, some companies create separate supply chains for the different segments and profit centers within a store. Here's how this separation works:

• Pull highly perishable items out of traditional distribution channels and put them in more rapid-replenishment distribution channels, often called fresh or cold chains
• Use smaller, more agile trucks to make more frequent, speedy deliveries
• Give the grocer the fuel efficiency benefits of smaller trucks for the rapid-refill items
• Build smaller warehouses, closer together for quick, easy access

Ultimately, grocers and shippers may create more geographically accessible warehouses to respond to this accelerated perishables track — a shift that would help solve the truck driver shortage, as many more drivers would be able to return home the same day.

2. Route Optimization

Many food shippers require multi-stop, properly sequenced deliveries, adjusting for minimum miles, specific delivery windows and curfews. These efficient delivery routes emphasize the commitment to freshness by serving stores as often as possible.

Here's how carriers optimize routing:

• Geo-fencing technology, where a truck's onboard computer sends an alert to a store when a driver is within a certain range, can be utilized
• Alerts allow the store personnel to get organized and be ready for the delivery, adding efficiencies all around

Grocers need to schedule labor, so on-time deliveries are critical in order to have the staffing necessary to load and unload items from the truck and onto the store shelves.

3. Involve Drivers

Deliveries to grocery stores include more driver involvement than deliveries within other industries, so hiring the right type of individual is key.

The driver/grocer relationship can be beneficial to both parties. Here's how you can make it work:

• Explain to the driver up front the demands of the job, ensuring driver buy-in
• Provide proper training, especially considering today's rapidly evolving material handling equipment
• Grocers will appreciate driver expertise and will collaborate for a seamless transfer of goods
• Drivers will feel empowered and want to deliver their very best

4. Scale Rapidly

Within the grocery segment, volumes often spike during certain times of the year. The ability to scale up quickly enables grocers to keep their shelves stocked, generating consumer loyalty. Volume spike periods include:

• Seasonal promotions and holiday demand
• Winter weather forecasts in some parts of the country

To take advantage of the surge in volume, being flexible is a must. Planning extensively in preparation of surges is also an important key to meeting operational needs.

5. Verify Cold-Chain Compliance

The Food and Drug Administration is continuing to craft its final regulations surrounding the Food Safety Modernization Act. Carriers know there will be new restrictions on food haulers, which will add to the complexity of food delivery. These regulations are bound to affect everyone in every segment of the food supply chain. Here are some ways carriers can prepare to be in compliance:

• Spec newer, late-model equipment and conduct routine maintenance
• Install on-board, real-time, GPS-enabled temperature tracking devices, designed to monitor and record temperatures within the trailer throughout a route, ensuring food safety from dock to customer
• Use RFID (Radio frequency identification) technology on pallets or items, for quick, easy traceability in the event of a food safety crisis

By taking these five steps to define and delineate your food and beverage supply chain, you will see greater cost efficiencies and time savings, while creating a more compliant-ready transportation model.

How Penske Transportation Solutions Can Help

We have a team of experts ready to help you find the best solutions for your food and beverage needs, including commercial rental trucks and reefers, vehicle leases and maintenance, and logistics services.

The rise of digital technologies is changing the way food and beverage businesses operate, and advances in everything from artificial intelligence to blockchain have the potential to redefine companies while creating new opportunities. These advances are changing not only what is expected of businesses, but also what is expected of the leaders within the organizations.

The Business Side of Food and Beverage

Tata Consultancy Services calls the transformation Business 4.0. In a survey of 689 responses from senior finance executives in the United States and Europe conducted by CFO Research in collaboration with Tata Consultancy Services, about one-third of respondents ranked their finance functions’ digital capabilities in six categories as "moderate."

The six areas included analytics and measurement; agility and efficiency; business architecture; governance, risk management and compliance; shared services/business process outsourcing; and organizational alignment.

At Penske Transportation Solutions, we’ve focused on the digital capabilities that can benefit our food and beverage customers, and we have several solutions to help business owners capture, manage and utilize information so fleets can access data quickly and easily. This approach is particularly useful during planning, quarterly reviews and an audit.

Visibility and Data: Through Fleet Insight™, our proprietary online tool designed to give customers greater visibility and control of their fleet, business owners can access their data, including invoices, fuel planning information, and safety and compliance records, at any time. In addition, Fleet Insight allows customers to view and download information about any truck at any time.

Financial Reporting: Our billing and record keeping provides easy-to-understand information that is accessible online. This information is readily available for annual planning, quarterly reporting or in the event of an audit.

Fixed Costs: As business owners plan for the future, leasing can increase the reliable financial information they use for forecasting because expenses associated with a full-service lease are established in advance. Leasing can also free up capital that businesses can use to invest in new technology or growing the business.

Truck Technology: Equipment is advancing rapidly with manufacturers adding new safety features each year. By utilizing leases, fleets can keep the average age of their fleet low and take advantage of the latest technological advances, such as collision mitigation technology. This can also reduce insurance costs by reducing the risk of a crash, enhancing driver safety and improving driver retention, which can save on driver recruitment costs.

Data and Connectivity Drive Fleet Health and Improve Uptime

A reliable food and beverage fleet runs on data and fleet expertise. From knowing where your shipment is to ensuring that trucks are running at peak performance and temperature, data is a strategic asset, and Penske is using the vast amount of information from our data platform to improve the health of equipment, maximize fleet performance and improve uptime. That means that shippers who lease or rent from us can rest assured that the trucks delivering their products are up to the job.

Enhanced Fleet Performance

Marrying truck data with maintenance data leads to better uptime. Using data off the truck also enables more proactive solutions, including increasingly predictive maintenance, leading to improved fleet performance. This information is then used to identify failure rates and implement preventive maintenance practices allowing the ability to avoid potential failures and breakdowns altogether, ensuring that your refrigerated truck stays at optimal temperature and all your trucks stay on the road.

The data analysis process factors in the equipment's operating environment, geography and mileage to better identify maintenance needs.

Improve Uptime

And because data improves remote diagnostics, technicians can get to the maintenance faster, get equipment fixed faster and back on the road delivering your food and beverage freight faster. If a roadside event occurs, data from the truck is given to our 24/7 coordinators so they can pinpoint where the truck is, identify the right service technician for the job and ensure the right tools are available.

Connectivity also increases visibility, so we can monitor the timeliness of PMs (Preventive Maintenance), how many trucks are in for repair, the number of road calls on a particular day and overall fleet maintenance costs. Having the capability to identify trucks that may be costing more due to breakdowns and failures provides an additional benefit.

The overall goal is to use data to have greater insight into fleet performance, improve the health of the vehicles and keep your trucks running smoothly.

Increase Supply Chain Visibility to Gain Control

A strong supply chain is central to effective food and beverage operations, but anything from rapid growth to external forces can disrupt operations. When a cold chain is out of control, the right people, processes and technology can bring it back in line to improve service, optimize routes and reduce costs.

See the Entire Cold Chain

Having an accurate line of sight into each part of the cold chain helps keep it in check. Near real-time information is critical and knowing where products are and when they will arrive can speed decision making, ensure freshness, inform orders and help mitigate problems before they occur.

Improved visibility also directly affects inventory management. When all parts of the supply chain are connected, systems can combine data on inventory practices and levels with supplier lead times and anticipated demand to inform food and beverage ordering and production. That, in turn, improves fill rates and reduces backorders while also eliminating overstock and spoilage situations, which reduces inventory costs.

Compare Fulfillment Solutions

Data and visibility help shippers determine the cost service benefit of fulfilling through various means, which is becoming more essential in today's omnichannel environment.

Shippers also must factor in intangible benefits, such as customer satisfaction, public perception and, ultimately, customer retention.

Connect Essential Teams

Visibility lays the groundwork to connect teams, such as customer service, sales, procurement and transportation. That connectivity can identify how individual decisions will impact different stakeholders.

With multiple influences in supply chains, it is valuable to opt for the best overall option over something that may only be beneficial to one aspect of the cold chain.

Connectivity also makes it easier to identify exceptions, creating even more control, while greater visibility offers the ability to assess situations and potential solutions, allowing for more informed decisions.

That, in turn, ensures products arrive fresh and exactly when and where they are needed so no sales opportunities are lost. Having the flexibility to shift fulfillment can be even more important when demand surges.

A Reliable Fleet and Innovative Provider

At Penske, we're built on the strength and expertise it takes to own and maintain more than 300,000 vehicles. With that kind of experience, you can rest assured that we offer some of the best-maintained and reliable trucks, reefers and tractors in the industry. Additionally, Penske has decades of experience in all areas of the food and beverage supply chain.

In a transparent supply chain, every link has access to relevant information on the origins and status of products. Transparency underpins consumer trust—a key relationship at a time when the safety of food supply chains is coming under intense scrutiny.

It's not surprising, then, that achieving supply chain transparency has become a hot-button issue in the food and beverage industry.

Critical Ingredient: Communications

An important feature of transparency is that it depends, to a large extent, on a company's ability to exchange information with partners. It can't be achieved in isolation. Visibility, on the other hand, is less dependent on communication across the supply chain.

Shay Scott, executive director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee, makes this clear in the trade journal Inbound Logistics. "Visibility provides a company with knowledge of activities across its supply chain; transparency is what and how it communicates that knowledge to customers, partners, and stakeholders."

Transportation Challenges

There are many ways in which you can enhance supply chain transparency. A notable example is addressing information black holes in transportation legs, where gaps in visibility can lead to transparency issues and loss of sleep for shippers.

For instance, rising less-than-truckload (LTL) and small parcel volumes make it more difficult for shippers to track product flows. An informal survey carried out by Penske Transportation Solutions for our customers in the food and beverage industry indicates that there are five LTL shipments for every single truckload shipment; a ratio that is reflective of the industry as a whole.

There are several reasons for soaring LTL volumes. The incursion of e-commerce into the food and beverage business is one driver. Catering to online buyers requires food companies to ship in smaller quantities. Other drivers include increasing demand for niche products and a general tendency for companies to ignore manufacturers' minimum buy quantities in a volatile competitive environment.

LTL tends to increase shipping touchpoints and cross-docks, reducing supply chain visibility in the process.

Another pain point is mismatches between requested delivery and appointment dates. A company requests a date for the delivery of a shipment, but the receiving dock sets a different date. This mismatch can even occur within the same organization, remaining undetected until a truck turns up at a dock and can't be loaded or unloaded because it's not on the facility's schedule.

A critical area where food supply chains can become opaque is in lot control visibility. This is a major issue in the transportation of products, such as fresh produce, that are supplied by countless growers and prone to bacterial infections. Each batch of product has a lot control number, and failure to keep track of these numbers creates dangerous visibility gaps.

You can play a critical role in addressing transportation visibility issues. You can deploy technology such as transportation management systems to track shipments and disseminate information, analyze freight networks and help shippers identify exceptions and information disconnects. Predictive analytics is one of the tools beneficial when trying to anticipate and avoid problems.

Innovations Ahead

The pressure to deliver improved transparency in food and beverage supply chains is unlikely to abate. Consumers are demanding more information on the foods they buy in retail stores and service outlets. High-profile cases of foodborne illness outbreaks have ratcheted up these demands. In response, regulators are introducing tighter food safety rules. Moreover, shippers need to respond to increasing supply chain complexity with innovative approaches to raising the efficiency bar.

But new tools and methods are emerging. Innovative technologies can provide a wide range of new data on truck performance. Vehicle automation is another source of operational data being mined. More sophisticated modeling that uses technologies such as machine learning is turning this data into actionable intelligence. Blockchain-based solutions are at an early stage of development but could facilitate the flow of information between stakeholders.

We continue to enhance our technology platform while also building industry partnerships. Our expertise and the technologies we employ can help you improve transparency within the cold chain by closing the loop with business analytics and ensuring that information is not lost or overlooked.

From knowing where your shipment is to ensuring that trucks are running at peak performance, data is a strategic asset, and Penske is using the vast amount of information from its connected fleet solutions to improve the health of its equipment, maximize fleet performance and improve uptime.

Connecting Fleets

With our connected fleet solutions, Penske marries the data off of the trucks with our maintenance data to create better uptime. Penske can take data from 300,000 vehicles and begin to see patterns of codes that might indicate an issue. Without that scale, you would never have the amount of data you need to get that benefit.

Enhanced Fleet Performance

Using data off the truck enables us to be more proactive and leads to a more customized maintenance solution for improved fleet performance. Penske uses the truck data to identify failure rates and shape preventive maintenance practices to get ahead of a potential failure. We also know which combination of vehicle fault codes can lead to a breakdown and work with our shops and our customers to proactively schedule a truck for service to get ahead of potential issues before they become a problem.

The data analysis process factors in the equipment's operating environment, geography and mileage to better identify maintenance needs.

Because data improves remote diagnostics, technicians can be more prepared to get equipment fixed faster and get your drivers back on the road faster. If a roadside event occurs, data from the truck is given to Penske’s 24/7 coordinators so they can pinpoint where the truck is, identify the right service technician for the job and ensure the right tools are available.

Connectivity also increases visibility, so Penske can monitor the timeliness of PMs, how many trucks are in for repair, the number of road calls on a particular day and overall fleet maintenance costs. We can drill down to see which truck is costing more and help you determine if it is time to replace that truck.

The overall goal is to use data to have greater insight into fleet performance, improve the health of the vehicles and keep the fleet running smoothly. Penske takes multiple streams of information to make the data actionable. The tools help us deliver a better experience and keep costs low.

A Reliable Fleet

A fleet leasing solution from Penske is built on the strength of the entire Penske fleet. As a company, Penske Transportation Solutions owns and maintains a fleet of more than 300,000 vehicles. With that kind of expertise, you can rest assured that you will be running some of the best-maintained and reliable trucks and tractors in the industry.