Opinion | Why fresh produce shippers are quietly moving away from transactional freight relationships
By Nate Schwandt, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Alpha Zero Logistics.
Here is a truth most logistics brokers won't say out loud: the spot market has always been a tool, not a strategy. But somewhere along the way, a lot of fresh produce shippers forgot the difference.
I've watched this play out repeatedly. A shipper gets pinched on cost, moves volume to whoever has the cheapest rate that week, and tells themselves they'll revisit the carrier relationships when things settle down.
But things don't settle down; the next disruption comes, and they're back on the spot market, bidding against everyone else for trucks that may or may not show up.
The produce industry runs on margins tight enough that a single missed delivery can wipe out the profit on an entire load. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), approximately 14 percent of food spoils before it ever reaches retailers, representing a loss of $400 billion annually, and transportation failures are a leading driver.
That’s not a supply chain that can afford to treat freight logistics as a commodity. Effective perishable freight management starts with recognizing that distinction.
The transactional model of logistics and where it falls apart
The appeal of transactional freight is obvious: no commitments, maximum flexibility, and price discovery on every load. In theory, you're always getting market rate. In practice, you're getting market rate on someone else's terms.
Carriers allocate capacity to shippers they trust. The shipper who only calls when they need something cheap is the first one to get a callback that starts with "We're running thin right now." For most logistics categories, that’s an inconvenience. For temperature-controlled produce, it’s a product liability issue.
Strawberries don’t wait for a carrier to free up a reefer. Stone fruit doesn’t negotiate. Research from Food Engineering Magazine estimates that between 7 and 15 percent of all food waste happens specifically during transport, and a 2024 University of Michigan study linked poor cold chain management logistics to roughly 620 million metric tons of annual global food loss.
When the truck isn’t there, the load doesn’t move, and by tomorrow, it may not be worth moving.
What a shift in philosophy actually looks like
The shippers I've seen make meaningful improvements in service reliability and cost consistency aren't doing anything exotic. They've simply decided to stop treating every load as a standalone transaction and start thinking about their freight program as a set of managed logistics relationships. That shift has a few practical dimensions.
First, carrier segmentation. Not every lane has the same risk profile. High-frequency, temperature-sensitive lanes to major distribution centers deserve preferred-carrier agreements with defined capacity commitments. Spot market exposure belongs on lower-priority, more flexible freight, not on the loads where failure isn't recoverable.
Second, data discipline. You can't manage relationships you don't measure. On-time pickup, on-time delivery, load acceptance rates, temperature compliance, claims frequency—these aren't just metrics for a quarterly review. They're the foundation for having a real conversation with a carrier about what a long-term lane commitment looks like.
Third, visibility. This is where a lot of shippers are underinvested. Real-time load tracking isn't just a customer service feature—it's a risk management tool. If you know a load is running behind at 2 p.m., you have options. If you find out at 6 a.m. the next day when the receiver calls, you don't.
The real cost argument
There’s a version of this conversation that gets framed purely as cost reduction, and I think that framing undersells it.
The real argument for moving away from transactional freight isn’t that you’ll spend less on every load, but that you’ll spend less overall, because you’ll have fewer failures, fewer emergency recoveries, fewer claims, and fewer relationships to rebuild after a bad season.
This is what a well-run freight program looks like for a perishable shipper. It’s not about squeezing basis points out of the rate, but about engineering a freight program that performs consistently enough that your operations team isn’t spending half their time on damage control.
Referential image | Archive
To put a number on it: reefer tender rejection rates surpassed 20 percent in late 2024 and remained elevated well into 2025, according to a January 2025 Arrive Logistics report. That means one in five contracted loads was being turned away by carriers during peak periods. For a spot-dependent shipper, that’s not a statistic—that’s a missed window and a spoiled load.
The shippers who have done this well tend to share a few characteristics: they've invested in understanding their own lane data, they've given carrier partners enough consistent volume to make the relationship worth protecting on both sides, and they've stopped using price as the only signal of carrier quality.
A note on timing
I’m not suggesting the spot market has no role: The produce supply chain is seasonal and volatile, and there will always be moments where you need incremental capacity fast. The question is whether spot is your logistics strategy or your backstop.
Consider the data: DAT Freight & Analytics has documented that reefer spot rates historically gain between 20 and 25 cents per mile between mid-April and July 4th each year, driven almost entirely by produce season. In 2025, reefer spot rates averaged over $2.00 per mile with seasonal peaks pushing higher still in produce-heavy lanes. Relying on spot as your primary strategy means you’re absorbing that premium every logistics cycle.
The shippers who've built strong carrier relationships are actually better spot market participants when they need to be, because when they call a carrier they've done 200 loads with this year and say "I need a truck tomorrow." And that call gets answered differently than the same request from a number the carrier doesn't recognize.
That's not a soft, relationship-feelings argument—that's a capacity allocation reality. Carriers are businesses, too. They protect the customers who make their operations predictable.
The quiet part
The reason this shift is happening quietly is that it doesn’t make for a great press release. “We decided to build better freight relationships” isn’t a headline.
But talk to the produce shippers who’ve been consistently well-served through the last several years of market disruption, and you’ll find that most of them made some version of this decision, often without calling it anything at all.
Referential image | Archive
The market backdrop makes the stakes even clearer: FMCSA data shows carrier net revocations running 16 percent above 2024’s pace through the first half of 2025, meaning the pool of available reefer capacity is shrinking. Shippers who haven’t invested in those relationships are competing for fewer trucks in a tighter market every season.
They just stopped treating freight like a commodity and started treating it like a function that needed to be managed. The results tend to follow.
*All images courtesy of Alpha Zero Logistics unless stated otherwise.
Nate Schwandt is the Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Alpha Zero Logistics, where he leads commercial strategy and go-to-market execution for complex, high-stakes supply chains. With a background spanning logistics, transportation, and B2B growth, he focuses on building scalable systems and long-term partnerships across aerospace, manufacturing, energy, and industrial markets.
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