September 15, 2025 • 31 mins
What’s really going on in today’s produce and freight markets? Why are growers taking massive hits while carriers in Florida see rates spike overnight?
In this episode, Cody Koehler is back to break down the ripple effects from California’s record harvest challenges, Florida’s severe capacity shortages after new regulations, the Pacific Northwest’s rate swings driven by onion and potato harvests, and why fraud prevention has become the number one competitive edge for brokers.
We also discuss how capacity relationships, pricing transparency, and customer education create long-term trust, as well as how RFP strategies and Federal Reserve rate cuts may shape the next market cycle.
About Cody Koehler
Cody is a 21-year veteran in supply chain/logistics. He has done just about everything in this industry minus holding his CDL (he did drive a yard dog though). In his current role, he oversees the sales and marketing teams for A&Z trucking, a 20-year old brokerage that specializes in produce and reefer freight, as well as cold storage and cross docking.
Connect with Cody
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cody-koehler-1a922b162/
- Website: https://aandztrucking.com/
- Email: info@aandztrucking.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Came back with a plank window down yelling now money anything hey oh got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the blame moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them hate them make a bigger boss hey.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
What is up, ladies and gentlemen?
We are back.
We are live.
It is the Freight Coach podcast, the top podcast in transportation, coming to you guys every single weekday, 8:30 in Pacific, 10:30 Central, to break down some industry headlines.
But most importantly, you guys provide some actual insight into what you can do with all of this information.
If this is your first time tuning in, welcome.
This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen.
(00:47):
And I do say that before every single show.
And what I mean by that is I only speak with transportation professionals because at the end of the day, you guys, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve.
So you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life.
Happy Monday, everybody.
I got a very special guest for you guys.
(01:07):
I'm going to bring him up here in a second.
We're going to be doing a little fall produce freight style market update out there.
But my team always likes to remind me and that I need to say this at the beginning of the show as well.
If you get value in what you hear today, you guys, and you're not subscribed, subscribe to the show, you guys.
And if you're feeling ambitious after this one, rank the show on itunes and Spotify because that's how we get out there and reach more and more people, you guys.
(01:29):
Like, at the end of the day, we talk about transportation on this show and if you saw value in it, chances are your network's going to see it as well.
With that being said, you guys, I got my good friend Yankee fan Cody Kaylor back on the show to break down some fall produce reports.
So, Cody, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, buddy.
It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
No, absolutely, man.
It's like, it's funny because, like, I was looking and I'm like, damn, it's been like since May, since Cody was on the show last.
And I like, you know, usually having you come on every couple of months just to break down inside of produce.
And I always love having my friends who run operations that are Niche specific, come on the show because you guys can always bring such a greater insight into that industry.
(02:13):
Right.
Because there's so much freight that's out there.
There's so much opportunity that goes on.
And you know, I, I just don't think like you can really speak in general terms anymore, especially with like how much data and how much information's out there for our prospects and our shippers to utilize.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Agreed.
And everything's different.
Every commodity is different, it seems these days, like a lot more than it was, you know, just a couple years ago.
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, it's, you know, from my seat, Cody, you know, because obviously we're a almost 100% flatbed.
Right.
Open deck.
And I've just noticed even from a business development perspective, it helps us at least position ourselves as like that next man up in their providers list when they know like when we're going in there and we're prospecting them on that niche level where, you know, dude, you know more about produce and food freight than 99% of the people in this industry.
(03:07):
Right.
So it's like you're out there and when you and your team are prospecting people, like, what are some of those things?
Like, and before we get into the market, I want to start, I want touch a little bit more on like, what are some of those things that you and your team are utilizing right now to kind of at least like get noticed from prospects?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I mean, you know, everybody wants to talk about service level usually in their pitch, but we kind of shy away from that because you made that point a million times.
You know, watch.
By the way, I love your intro now.
New intro is great.
But yeah, you talk about it all the time that you know, that's service levels, the expectation.
Right.
So for us, trying to stand out is more, you know, we touch, we like touch on the fraud.
(03:45):
Fraud is so bad right now.
And so allowing our potential customers to understand our process and making sure that the drivers that are going to be on your loads are a real driver.
They're really going to show up to the facility, they're really going to deliver on time.
They're really going to, you know, that type of stuff right now has been.
Been a big one for us because fraud is on everybody's mind.
(04:05):
But also, you know, from a food standpoint, it's tough out there.
This has been a really odd summer.
It's been an odd year.
But this summer's been interesting for produce to say the least.
Like that we finally Had a good season where we didn't have water issues and we didn't have temperature issues.
But the demand was absolute crap on the fresh side of things anyways.
(04:28):
So we, what we ended up with was a great harvest, especially the first cut this year in California and Salinas, but the demand wasn't there.
So a lot of processing plants have been very busy.
A lot of that stuff's going to get frozen, juiced, canned, whatever, right.
Doesn't go to waste by any means.
But it's just a different, it's different than ordering.
(04:49):
You know, I can't remember what the dean had reported not too long ago about the impact.
And from a truckload standpoint it was like upwards of like 10 grand a month less truckload demand out of California this season versus last year.
And that's huge.
You know, when you're, when you break that down, 2500 trucks less from a demand perspective per week, obviously that's going to affect rates.
(05:13):
Your capacity is going to be very loose for the most part.
We didn't really see a typical fourth of July bump this year.
It was, it was very small compared to previous years.
So knowing all of that, you know, we've just been trying to get as creative as we can through the process.
We are very niche based.
We are all food and Bev, we do have some agents that work with us that touch on flatbed.
(05:36):
But I, to be honest with you, I couldn't even touch, I couldn't even talk to any of that.
But from a food perspective right now it's mostly just like right now, I won't lie.
You can touch on the Florida issue.
You know, I'm sure that you've noticed that too.
Like Florida inbound has been absolutely crazy since they had that accident, that terrible accident.
And they put some checkpoints in there making sure that all the English speaking drivers were, you know, all the, the checkpoints that are going into effect with that.
(06:05):
There's a lot of drivers that are, have all of a sudden refused to go to Florida.
So Florida inbound rates have gone crazy and there's a lot of shippers down there.
So if you guys prospecting right now make sure that you can get the capacity.
But Florida market's pretty open right now.
Prospect it.
And then outside of that just, we saw a big pocket of disruption in the Midwest not too long ago.
(06:26):
A lot of that was attributed to a better than predicted back to school poll.
It wasn't too bad and so kind of following the trends.
I mean the, the data that like, you know, we crunch with DAT every week to make sure we part.
We have a great partnership with those guys to understand the markets, what's getting hot and what's not so that you can dive into the reasons why and you can use that to sell.
(06:48):
But honestly our sales pitch is going to change sometimes week to week, sometimes day to day, depending on just what we're seeing in the market.
So I think that's the most important thing honestly is staying on top of it.
You know, from a niche base it's easy to talk produce when we've been doing it for, we've been doing this since 03.
So you know, you can talk about all the nuances with that all you want.
(07:08):
Making sure that reefers are, you know, if you're moving berries and cherries, you want your reefers less than three years old.
Everything has to be downloadable.
Everybody's going to track and you're going to be able to give those guys an actual tracking link to see where the product's at 24 7.
And because you get those weird, maybe not weird, but you get those guys who literally are probably sitting at their computer at 10 o' clock at night sipping a drink saying I want to see where my truck's at.
(07:31):
And then you have the others that they just don't care.
They just want to know that their product's going to show up on time so doing all those little things.
But I think the biggest thing right now is just paying attention to the market because it seems like it's shifting all the time and some of it's easy to explain and some of it's not.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
What do you mean by that?
Right, like when the market's shifting because like I see that even on the flatbed side of things, right where it's like sometimes like.
And again like 80 of our freight, like we actually just pulled the data this morning.
80 of our freight is ran with our core carriers.
So like we're not really seeing much fluctuation or you know, even on pricing or anything like that out there.
(08:09):
But when we do have to go out and source in the spot market, it's, it is noticeable man, that like some days, and it's not even really market dependent, right that there is a, I don't want to call it like a price increase of you know, unreasonable sorts out there.
But you, dude, you can definitely tell and it's like where I see it is like man, that used to be how like outbound LA used to be on a Friday, right.
(08:36):
Like book it easy or early because the later in the day, the higher the price gets.
And I, and I'm starting to notice that in some of our markets, like if we have to recover a load for whatever reason on a Friday or even later on in the day, vastly more expensive than it would be earlier in the day.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Agreed.
And.
And some of the markets I'm going to use Pacific Northwest because it's starting to pick up.
We're already seeing a decent harvest for onions and potatoes.
Onions just moved back up to the Washington area not too long ago.
It was like mid August that moves up.
And that one is extremely day of the week dependent.
And it's crazy when I talk to people who don't work in produce that much, but you will literally pay $1,000 less for a truck on a Monday than you will on a Friday or a Thursday.
(09:22):
And part of that goes into working with your customers, working with your buyers, getting those guys to understand that you want to obviously have the most competitive rate for those guys without closing your doors because you're losing money left and right.
And so working through some of that with those guys, letting those guys understand that if you have to purchase on a Thursday and Friday, even if it's going to run on our dedicated own equipment, because let's be real, I mean, like if you work with a carrier for even 10 years and they know that there's a thousand dollars difference if they book on spot from a Monday to a Friday and you're not figuring out how to compensate them somewhere in the middle on that, to have them book on a Friday, they're going to go somewhere else.
(09:59):
You got to take care of your carriers and you got to be realistic and you have to understand the market itself.
And I think a lot of that goes into your pricing and most importantly, your communication to your customers to let them understand it too.
Because a lot of those guys don't understand.
I was, I was on the Shipper side for 13 years.
I had no clue.
To me, a rate was a rate, right?
A truck was a truck.
(10:19):
I always knew that there was a premium for a Saturday or Sunday load and unload.
But outside of that, it's like, what's the difference between Friday and Monday?
Who cares?
Everybody's working those days.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
How important is it that though, to like actually explain that to your customers?
Because like, that's something that we do and a lot of it is more like mileage specifically.
So I pretty much anything that's less than a thousand miles that picks on a Friday and delivers on a Monday, I'm going to let my customer know like, hey, this is going to be more expensive to ship it out this day.
Especially if you're in a spot market style pricing with them.
(10:48):
Then it will be Monday through Thursday.
Right.
And I will, I'll explain that on a lot of the lanes that we come across with our customers.
Right.
And you know, again, same thing because like we'll move some freight here out of Arizona, going into New Mexico for example.
And I've told my customer like, hey, if we can ship this Monday through Thursday, here's your rate.
We won't deviate away from that.
(11:09):
But if that has to ship Friday for a Monday delivery, this is why it's more expensive.
And I took the time to explain it to them.
And again you get that feeling that nobody's doing that.
Right.
Like nobody's explaining.
They just are out there marking it up an extra $800 or you know, hypothetically, whatever that looks like.
And there's no real reasoning behind that.
How important is that as a sales rep to go out there and explain those little differences to your customers so they're more prepared for that.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
It's huge.
I mean, it's huge.
I think context is king, right.
Like they have to understand the reasons why you're pricing things.
You know, if you're price gouging your customer, that's going to get flushed out at some point in time anyways.
Right.
And you're going to get the boot.
I just saw a headline this morning I think was from the freight caviar guys about Kroger soon a all that.
Yeah.
So you know, you have to.
(11:59):
And taking the time to explain those to your customer not only builds a better relationship, but our job as brokers is what I always tell my not just my sales reps, but my ops team too.
Our job is to make sure that they have peace of mind.
That's all it is.
Right.
Like they need to understand that they can tender you a load and you are going to see through A to Z.
(12:20):
That's why our name's A to Z Anz Trucking.
But like you need to be able to schedule that properly communicate with them properly.
To your point, you know, a Friday for a Monday pick up less than a thousand miles.
You have to have a layover built in on that from a pricing perspective because the drivers, like, you know, sometimes I, I hear stories.
Well, the driver can just, you know, sleep at home for A night and it'll be good for him.
(12:42):
And it's like, yeah, but you don't understand what that does to his hours of service.
Like, like, you have to understand they're not just robots that get to go like this all day long.
You know, they have to comply with all of these different hours of service regulations and everything else.
And if you mess with that in the slightest bit, you affect their next load and their next load until they do a reset.
Right.
So explaining all of that context to those guys, usually from a contract standpoint, we will price things based off of best case scenario and then have that conversation.
(13:11):
Most shippers do multiple rounds, at least in the food and bev, have that conversation after the first round and then really dial it in with the buyers that you're working with.
At least for us, that's how it typically works.
Right.
And talk to those buyers and make sure, hey, if, you know, if you don't want any service disruptions, these are the days that are premium.
These are the days that work best for us to load based off of our current capacity.
(13:33):
If you need me to go source capacity outside of what we currently have, then there is a potential price increase for that.
And having those conversations up front, I think are golden.
It gives you another opportunity to talk to the customer too.
And it gives you another opportunity to let the customer know that you actually know what you're doing.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Is that often over?
Like, I know the answer to this, but like, you know, for the context of the listeners out there, how often is that overlooked?
And you know, from my seat, you know, I've heard this from numerous shippers of ours.
Right.
Is, is, you know, like at the end of the day, like, hey, we're a manufacturer, we're not a transportation company.
Like, this is why we hired you and you need to bring this to our attention.
(14:12):
And, and like, and I know that I use this term a lot, but like, this is another one of those things that I mean, like, I would rather take five minutes on the front end of a relationship to explain a lot of this stuff to a customer.
Or even in the heat of the moment, say you haven't.
And that comes up because like, there needs to be a justification behind like, hey, why is this exact same load now $400 more like you have to be able to explain that.
(14:36):
And again, more often than not, your customers are going to be no harm, no foul because they know why.
Right.
Like they know that you're not just throwing darts at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Like, no, this is why it is what it is.
Like, yeah, you might get lucky and find that one driver who lives in the receiving city who's going to do a shutdown at home and all of that stuff, right?
Like, you might get there, but chances are you're probably not.
(14:58):
And you know, again, it's, you need to keep this service at a higher level.
It's easy to say it, but I feel like, at least from my perspective, very few are executing upon it and having that conversation that you're describing right there, Cody.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Oh, I agree.
And, and from my experience on the other end of this, I would say probably close to 80 or 90%, because I can't count how many times we used to refer to them as paper rates, right?
The rate looks great on paper, but you're probably not going to be able to execute on it, right.
And I can't count how many times I would get a great rate up front.
And it took me probably a year to learn this when I was on the shipper side.
(15:33):
Like, you know, the best rate isn't always your best option, right?
A lot of those are paper rates.
And a lot of times I, you know, I can't count how many times they had to come mid bid with their hand open saying, you know, we're getting crushed here.
And it's like, well, if you're getting crushed, why did you bid so low?
Well, it's because that's where we thought the market was going to be at.
And Saddam always told me one, you either don't know what you're talking about or you just bid low to get on the lane and then you're hoping that midway through you're going to be able to have a conversation with me.
(16:00):
And, and happens, I understand that those things like market shift, nobody could have seen what happened in Florida, right?
Like, nobody could have predicted that.
But you know, Pacific Northwest, if you're not educated enough to know that produce in the Pacific Northwest, which pretty much includes Salt Lake all the way up, because there's onions and potatoes in Idaho and Salt Lake and all that fun stuff all the way up through Washington, if you're not educated enough to know that rates start to creep up mid August and they peak right around December, January, and you're not building that into your rates, then you shouldn't be bidding it.
(16:33):
And if your shippers don't know that, I mean, typically your shipper is going to know that they've been doing it for a while but if they don't know that, it is your job to help educate them on why you're bidding, what you're bidding, why you're pricing things the way that you're pricing them.
All shippers know that you have to have some sort of margin in there.
We've got lights we got to keep on, we've got Internet we got to pay for, we've got subscriptions to everything we got to pay for.
And we have people that we got to pay.
(16:54):
Right.
So they all know you got to have a margin.
But if you're going in with a 20 or 30% margin on a load, you know, spot's completely different.
Not going to talk about that.
But from a contract standpoint, if you're going in that high, you've got to be able to justify the reason for that.
Because maybe that 20 or 30% is taking into account that two or three months out of that year long bid, you're going to be in the negative.
(17:15):
Yeah, right.
You got to be able to explain that to them and they have to be able to understand it in real time, like layman's terms, instead of just saying this is the rate, you know, this is the rate that we get and like, cool.
Well, you know, you're the out of ten carriers, you're number nine on my pricing list.
So without that context of why that is, they're probably just going to go at the cheapest rate.
(17:36):
You're going to lose out an opportunity and that shipper is probably going to end up getting burned.
So to me, that's your opportunity to build that relationship of trust.
You know, I'm at a point with some of our shippers where if another carrier asks for a rate increase, the first person that they call is me and say, hey, what's going on in this market?
Like even for a lane, I don't run because they know that I'm going to be honest with them.
(17:56):
They know that I'm going to tell them like you're getting gouged or they bid too low or hey, you know, like the Florida thing that just happened, rates are crazy down there.
And you know, a lot of your dedicated capacity that was going into Florida before is now refusing to.
You can't change that.
You've got to communicate that to your customers.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
How are you guys out there kind of explaining where things are in the market and how you perceive them to trend here for the coming months?
Right, because it's like that.
I think the general consensus out there Is people know that they're on the verge of a change or like something is going to increase but nobody wants it to.
(18:35):
Right on the like whoever's benefiting the most from this.
But like how are you guys out there bringing market reports to your customer?
And, and you know, because like from my perspective, I've just found in like, and one, I mean a very big strategy of ours is like hey, we want to keep our rates like literally the exact same because like we filled out RFPs, but like our, the majority of our freight is spot market freight out there.
(18:59):
But again, I feel like there's a way to give contracted pricing in a spot market environment out there by keeping that same price time and time again.
And you know, for us from my seat, like we're kind of coming up on the end of flatbed season here.
We're pretty much through October and then it'll, you know, it'll dip off there from November through February and then as soon as the ground starts thawing off again.
(19:19):
But like, I look at it as is, there's a giant question mark on how much longer things are going to continue in this capacity out there.
How are you guys delivering any form of consistency to your guys customers right now?
Speaker 3 (19:34):
So we produce a market report.
If you don't follow us, we produce it on our website.
We also produce it on LinkedIn.
Bella Montoya, she's one of my team members, she actually produces the report, sends it to all of our customers, also publishes it out there.
And it's very food specific, you know, taken into the economy of what's going on with what we're seeing with food.
(19:55):
Very produce specific but we like to get in front of it.
And then also, you know, from an RFP standpoint because we, you know, everybody talks about RFP season, but unfortunately in food and produce, like it's RFP season every single month.
I mean I have, you know, I'm churning out probably three to four RFPs a week right now.
And with that it's the conversation of saying, hey, we're going to put our best foot forward.
(20:17):
We're going to go into this assuming that there is not going to be a major shift in the market during this time frame.
However, context, if that shift happens, we do have to have a conversation.
If you tell your customer that up front and let them know I'm putting my best foot forward, I'm trying to save you as much money as I possibly can without sacrificing service and taking care of my Carriers on top of that.
(20:38):
Because at the end of the day you still want the same driver showing up for most loads, gets to know the receiver, gets to know the shipper.
That's your best case scenario from a service level standpoint.
So you've got to price that accordingly.
But you also have to have that conversation with the shippers.
Right now I think in this market is this could shift at any time and this could be next month.
We could be looking at a, oh my God, everybody's pulling their hair out and you know, all of a sudden the spot market runs up and contracts getting defaulted on all over the place.
(21:05):
I don't think that's going to happen, personally.
I think the most important thing right now is the Fed interest rate.
Keeping that in mind and I am hearing that they, you were looking at least, you know, 25% or you know, a 25% or blah, blah,.25% drop in September, potentially one in October, potentially one in November and December.
(21:28):
We'll see how all that shakes out.
But I think that's going to lead to potentially an uptick in volume.
The good thing, at least on our end, we are pretty steady Eddie throughout most of the year because people always have to eat.
We don't really truck any luxury items.
But we also, I learned a long time ago flatbed.
(21:48):
Flatbed usually dictates how the rest of the year is going to go.
If you have a good start to the flatbed season in February and March, which is usually the kickoff for housing.
Right.
Because the grounds thawed and all that stuff and everything outside of Arizona and Florida and Texas, you know, starts to go up.
What if you can see that trend, you know that dry ban and reefers are probably four to six months behind that.
(22:13):
Yeah.
So we keep an eye on those things.
We report on the flatbed market because that usually is a leading indicator as well as anything economically that we can that sometimes these guys aren't digesting because you know as well as I do there's so much damn clickbait out there, you don't know what to trust.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Dude, it's alarmingly high.
It really is.
And you know, and you know, because like from my perspective we're hearing from, I like, I'm not even over exaggerating here.
99 of our prospects are.
They have all directly, not indirectly directly said this year was about 40 to 50% slower than we had anticipated from overall freight volumes out there.
(22:51):
And again like we're like from a business development perspective like, we're having a lot of success in like getting in with the decision maker in the, in regards of like, we're having conversations with them.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
That doesn't mean that we're getting set up and they're like, oh, hey, here's all this freight.
But we've heard it from like, legitimately, man, 99 of our prospects have all said in one percentage or another, like 40 to 50% slower.
Like, the majority of them were like, we should be working 65 hours a week.
Right now we're barely getting 40.
And it's so like, to me, that is the big thing.
(23:25):
And like, and I'm right there with you in regards to interest rates because I look at it from like a cost to hold inventory perspective.
And then like, how much more willing are they going to be risked or how much more willing are they going to be to take that risk to pre order a bunch of inventory as well, to get it in there in that anticipation?
And you know, I think, like, it's very evident where things are right now.
(23:47):
And, and I think like, a lot of people need to caution because, like, you see, they're like, oh, Trump's been in office for eight months now.
Why isn't the world fixed?
And it's, you know, it's one of those things, like, it takes a lot of time.
And I, I understand that.
I think more than most people are wanting to admit that it completely, I think, rests on the shoulders of the Fed and lowering the interest rates out there because that's going to give people more even consumer spending.
(24:14):
Like you said out there about, like, which you said earlier, Cody, about produce.
Right?
Like, how many people weren't buying fresh produce this year because it wasn't in their budget?
They couldn't afford it.
Right.
And your numbers there that you're describing is the only proof that I needed.
That's probably the case, right?
Because they're like, why would I buy that when I could get it, you know, frozen for cheaper or whatever that looks like, right?
(24:36):
Or they're just not buying fruit at.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
All at this point.
Yeah, I mean, that's like, I'm guilty every single week that I make my Costco run and I buy one of the big things of strawberries, right?
Every, every single Sunday that I go and I do that, I think, okay, by the end of the week we're going to buzz through this.
By the end of the week, probably a quarter of it's bad, right?
Because we eat through most of it and then so that type of stuff.
If you compound that with the pricing of everything, people started shifting their buying habits to frozen strawberries.
(25:02):
I actually started doing that for my smoothies and stuff.
Like, why have fresh when I can have a bag of frozen, a giant bag of frozen for a month in my freezer.
Right.
And so I think a lot of that happened this year because pricing has.
Has been completely out of hand for the last four years.
I mean, inflation's been crazy.
So.
But I, you know, for example, were seeing boxes of lettuce, for example, just iceberg last year, hovering around 45 to 50 bucks a case average.
(25:31):
The last four years has been anywhere between 30 and 50.
We were seeing it lower than 20 bucks a case this year.
This summer, were seeing cherries, a typical load of organic cherries.
You're talking 150 to $200,000 in value.
We were seeing under a hundred thousand dollars for the first time in the eight years that I've been doing this.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Explain that.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Like, demand.
There was no demand.
And so when I know, at least at the tail end of the Yuma season last year, most of the growers that I know were taking losses on most of their product because it was like they were so close to the end of the season.
It's like, do we either till this back up into the ground and just completely not make any money off of it, or are we going to take 50% of the value just to move the product and get.
(26:16):
And get some sort of revenue coming in?
And they were doing that.
And, you know, I. I was golfing not too long ago with one of my really good friends over in Castroville.
And what he told me, he's been doing this for 30 years.
He was actually.
He actually founded a company over there, I'm not going to mention.
But what he was telling me was, he said that this was the slowest summary he's seen in 20 years.
(26:36):
Oh, wow.
And so, and we felt it too.
I mean, definitely, you know, our produce volume was down.
We made up for it and some other volume, but our produce volume was definitely down this season.
And it's just.
It is what it is.
You get, you take those lumps.
Good news is hopefully, at least from the numbers that we're seeing from the Yuma season, we should have a good harvest again.
(26:59):
That's one part of the equation.
The other part of the equation is where's demand going to fall?
nobody really knows where that's going to fall yet.
A lot of that to both of our points is where's interest rates going to fall?
Where's consumer spending going to fall?
The more people eat out and eat their salads, the more you go to Olive Garden, get your never ending salad, the more I move produce, right?
So, but the less people do that, the more cost conscious people are and they're buying that frozen food and they're buying the canned food because it's shelf stable and they're not losing money on it.
(27:27):
The less and less we see on the fresh side.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
What is one as we're wrapping up here, Cody, what's one piece of advice you would give out to sales reps right now?
Whether they're developing business or maybe they got new, you know, newer relationships.
What is one thing that you would like to see more people focus on where they're going to see some value out there in the market with their customers?
Speaker 3 (27:50):
I think, you know, part of that would be context.
Like were talking about.
Make sure that you guys are educated on what you're talking about and not just, you know, going for the race to the bottom.
Like not all business is great business and then nobody wins when you're just trying to undercut each other by $0.05 per mile here.
The only, you know, the people who lose the most are the carriers, quite frankly.
And the more carriers you put out of business, the harder it's going to be to do your job six months from now.
(28:13):
So context is king.
Price it correctly.
And also like, just think, keep things in perspective.
Like right now, if you can land a contract to where you're actually set up with somebody, you don't necessarily have to be moving freight tomorrow with them, but it allows you to at least be there when they need you.
When they have those, you know, those effort Fridays where they get 20 loads given back to them and they need somebody there.
(28:38):
We've seen that, we've had success with that this year.
Probably more than actually getting set up with somebody, going through the normal RFP process and all, everything, just building those relationships and making sure that you're an option for those guys when they need you.
And I think that's the most important thing right now.
It also allows you to have those conversations with them.
We used to call it contract hunting, right?
Like make sure you get the contract, make sure you get the setup paperwork done and then after that wait for the market to improve slightly or wait for someone to fail.
(29:08):
I just met with somebody over the weekend that's a large customer of ours and was informed, hey, this coming Yuma season, we had a lot of Salinas carriers and in typically Salinas and Yuma, the same carriers, same brokers are going to be bidding on the same lanes, have major service failures.
And because of that, we are going to see a shift of up to 20% in those incumbent lanes.
That's an opportunity for us.
(29:28):
Right?
And that's an opportunity for new carriers and new brokers to get in there as well.
Just, just make sure you can get set up with those guys, make sure you're having the dialogue and don't rush anything right now.
I can tell you if you go in right now with rock bottom rates, you will get burned in the next six to 12 months.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
100%, dude.
Couldn't agree more.
Cody, thank you so much, man.
I appreciate the insight as always.
And what's going on out there in produce?
How does anybody reach out to you guys to find out more?
Are you guys hiring or anything like that?
Throw that out there.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah, always looking for great sales reps, operations.
We are actually hiring, but we're hiring in the Raleigh market right now in office.
And Outside of that, LinkedIn is the best way to contact me or my sales reps or anybody.
Obviously you can go to anzietrucking.com, contact me there as well.
But LinkedIn is the best.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Perfect.
Sounds good.
If you guys can't find Cody or Anz trucking out there on LinkedIn, hit me up.
I will gladly put you guys in contact with them, but that's going to be it for today.
Ladies and gentlemen.
As always, if you got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show, you guys.
And if you're feeling really ambitious after this one, rank the show on itunes and Spotify.
Because if you see value, your network's going to see it as well.
I appreciate you guys.
I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Came back with a bank Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the lane moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them hate them Make a bigger boss hey.
Came back with a plank window down yelling now money anything hey oh got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the blame moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them hate them make a bigger boss hey.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
What is up, ladies and gentlemen?
We are back.
We are live.
It is the Freight Coach podcast, the top podcast in transportation, coming to you guys every single weekday, 8:30 in Pacific, 10:30 Central, to break down some industry headlines.
But most importantly, you guys provide some actual insight into what you can do with all of this information.
If this is your first time tuning in, welcome.
This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen.
(00:47):
And I do say that before every single show.
And what I mean by that is I only speak with transportation professionals because at the end of the day, you guys, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve.
So you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life.
Happy Monday, everybody.
I got a very special guest for you guys.
(01:07):
I'm going to bring him up here in a second.
We're going to be doing a little fall produce freight style market update out there.
But my team always likes to remind me and that I need to say this at the beginning of the show as well.
If you get value in what you hear today, you guys, and you're not subscribed, subscribe to the show, you guys.
And if you're feeling ambitious after this one, rank the show on itunes and Spotify because that's how we get out there and reach more and more people, you guys.
(01:29):
Like, at the end of the day, we talk about transportation on this show and if you saw value in it, chances are your network's going to see it as well.
With that being said, you guys, I got my good friend Yankee fan Cody Kaylor back on the show to break down some fall produce reports.
So, Cody, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, buddy.
It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
No, absolutely, man.
It's like, it's funny because, like, I was looking and I'm like, damn, it's been like since May, since Cody was on the show last.
And I like, you know, usually having you come on every couple of months just to break down inside of produce.
And I always love having my friends who run operations that are Niche specific, come on the show because you guys can always bring such a greater insight into that industry.
(02:13):
Right.
Because there's so much freight that's out there.
There's so much opportunity that goes on.
And you know, I, I just don't think like you can really speak in general terms anymore, especially with like how much data and how much information's out there for our prospects and our shippers to utilize.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Agreed.
And everything's different.
Every commodity is different, it seems these days, like a lot more than it was, you know, just a couple years ago.
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, it's, you know, from my seat, Cody, you know, because obviously we're a almost 100% flatbed.
Right.
Open deck.
And I've just noticed even from a business development perspective, it helps us at least position ourselves as like that next man up in their providers list when they know like when we're going in there and we're prospecting them on that niche level where, you know, dude, you know more about produce and food freight than 99% of the people in this industry.
(03:07):
Right.
So it's like you're out there and when you and your team are prospecting people, like, what are some of those things?
Like, and before we get into the market, I want to start, I want touch a little bit more on like, what are some of those things that you and your team are utilizing right now to kind of at least like get noticed from prospects?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I mean, you know, everybody wants to talk about service level usually in their pitch, but we kind of shy away from that because you made that point a million times.
You know, watch.
By the way, I love your intro now.
New intro is great.
But yeah, you talk about it all the time that you know, that's service levels, the expectation.
Right.
So for us, trying to stand out is more, you know, we touch, we like touch on the fraud.
(03:45):
Fraud is so bad right now.
And so allowing our potential customers to understand our process and making sure that the drivers that are going to be on your loads are a real driver.
They're really going to show up to the facility, they're really going to deliver on time.
They're really going to, you know, that type of stuff right now has been.
Been a big one for us because fraud is on everybody's mind.
(04:05):
But also, you know, from a food standpoint, it's tough out there.
This has been a really odd summer.
It's been an odd year.
But this summer's been interesting for produce to say the least.
Like that we finally Had a good season where we didn't have water issues and we didn't have temperature issues.
But the demand was absolute crap on the fresh side of things anyways.
(04:28):
So we, what we ended up with was a great harvest, especially the first cut this year in California and Salinas, but the demand wasn't there.
So a lot of processing plants have been very busy.
A lot of that stuff's going to get frozen, juiced, canned, whatever, right.
Doesn't go to waste by any means.
But it's just a different, it's different than ordering.
(04:49):
You know, I can't remember what the dean had reported not too long ago about the impact.
And from a truckload standpoint it was like upwards of like 10 grand a month less truckload demand out of California this season versus last year.
And that's huge.
You know, when you're, when you break that down, 2500 trucks less from a demand perspective per week, obviously that's going to affect rates.
(05:13):
Your capacity is going to be very loose for the most part.
We didn't really see a typical fourth of July bump this year.
It was, it was very small compared to previous years.
So knowing all of that, you know, we've just been trying to get as creative as we can through the process.
We are very niche based.
We are all food and Bev, we do have some agents that work with us that touch on flatbed.
(05:36):
But I, to be honest with you, I couldn't even touch, I couldn't even talk to any of that.
But from a food perspective right now it's mostly just like right now, I won't lie.
You can touch on the Florida issue.
You know, I'm sure that you've noticed that too.
Like Florida inbound has been absolutely crazy since they had that accident, that terrible accident.
And they put some checkpoints in there making sure that all the English speaking drivers were, you know, all the, the checkpoints that are going into effect with that.
(06:05):
There's a lot of drivers that are, have all of a sudden refused to go to Florida.
So Florida inbound rates have gone crazy and there's a lot of shippers down there.
So if you guys prospecting right now make sure that you can get the capacity.
But Florida market's pretty open right now.
Prospect it.
And then outside of that just, we saw a big pocket of disruption in the Midwest not too long ago.
(06:26):
A lot of that was attributed to a better than predicted back to school poll.
It wasn't too bad and so kind of following the trends.
I mean the, the data that like, you know, we crunch with DAT every week to make sure we part.
We have a great partnership with those guys to understand the markets, what's getting hot and what's not so that you can dive into the reasons why and you can use that to sell.
(06:48):
But honestly our sales pitch is going to change sometimes week to week, sometimes day to day, depending on just what we're seeing in the market.
So I think that's the most important thing honestly is staying on top of it.
You know, from a niche base it's easy to talk produce when we've been doing it for, we've been doing this since 03.
So you know, you can talk about all the nuances with that all you want.
(07:08):
Making sure that reefers are, you know, if you're moving berries and cherries, you want your reefers less than three years old.
Everything has to be downloadable.
Everybody's going to track and you're going to be able to give those guys an actual tracking link to see where the product's at 24 7.
And because you get those weird, maybe not weird, but you get those guys who literally are probably sitting at their computer at 10 o' clock at night sipping a drink saying I want to see where my truck's at.
(07:31):
And then you have the others that they just don't care.
They just want to know that their product's going to show up on time so doing all those little things.
But I think the biggest thing right now is just paying attention to the market because it seems like it's shifting all the time and some of it's easy to explain and some of it's not.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
What do you mean by that?
Right, like when the market's shifting because like I see that even on the flatbed side of things, right where it's like sometimes like.
And again like 80 of our freight, like we actually just pulled the data this morning.
80 of our freight is ran with our core carriers.
So like we're not really seeing much fluctuation or you know, even on pricing or anything like that out there.
(08:09):
But when we do have to go out and source in the spot market, it's, it is noticeable man, that like some days, and it's not even really market dependent, right that there is a, I don't want to call it like a price increase of you know, unreasonable sorts out there.
But you, dude, you can definitely tell and it's like where I see it is like man, that used to be how like outbound LA used to be on a Friday, right.
(08:36):
Like book it easy or early because the later in the day, the higher the price gets.
And I, and I'm starting to notice that in some of our markets, like if we have to recover a load for whatever reason on a Friday or even later on in the day, vastly more expensive than it would be earlier in the day.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Agreed.
And.
And some of the markets I'm going to use Pacific Northwest because it's starting to pick up.
We're already seeing a decent harvest for onions and potatoes.
Onions just moved back up to the Washington area not too long ago.
It was like mid August that moves up.
And that one is extremely day of the week dependent.
And it's crazy when I talk to people who don't work in produce that much, but you will literally pay $1,000 less for a truck on a Monday than you will on a Friday or a Thursday.
(09:22):
And part of that goes into working with your customers, working with your buyers, getting those guys to understand that you want to obviously have the most competitive rate for those guys without closing your doors because you're losing money left and right.
And so working through some of that with those guys, letting those guys understand that if you have to purchase on a Thursday and Friday, even if it's going to run on our dedicated own equipment, because let's be real, I mean, like if you work with a carrier for even 10 years and they know that there's a thousand dollars difference if they book on spot from a Monday to a Friday and you're not figuring out how to compensate them somewhere in the middle on that, to have them book on a Friday, they're going to go somewhere else.
(09:59):
You got to take care of your carriers and you got to be realistic and you have to understand the market itself.
And I think a lot of that goes into your pricing and most importantly, your communication to your customers to let them understand it too.
Because a lot of those guys don't understand.
I was, I was on the Shipper side for 13 years.
I had no clue.
To me, a rate was a rate, right?
A truck was a truck.
(10:19):
I always knew that there was a premium for a Saturday or Sunday load and unload.
But outside of that, it's like, what's the difference between Friday and Monday?
Who cares?
Everybody's working those days.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
How important is it that though, to like actually explain that to your customers?
Because like, that's something that we do and a lot of it is more like mileage specifically.
So I pretty much anything that's less than a thousand miles that picks on a Friday and delivers on a Monday, I'm going to let my customer know like, hey, this is going to be more expensive to ship it out this day.
Especially if you're in a spot market style pricing with them.
(10:48):
Then it will be Monday through Thursday.
Right.
And I will, I'll explain that on a lot of the lanes that we come across with our customers.
Right.
And you know, again, same thing because like we'll move some freight here out of Arizona, going into New Mexico for example.
And I've told my customer like, hey, if we can ship this Monday through Thursday, here's your rate.
We won't deviate away from that.
(11:09):
But if that has to ship Friday for a Monday delivery, this is why it's more expensive.
And I took the time to explain it to them.
And again you get that feeling that nobody's doing that.
Right.
Like nobody's explaining.
They just are out there marking it up an extra $800 or you know, hypothetically, whatever that looks like.
And there's no real reasoning behind that.
How important is that as a sales rep to go out there and explain those little differences to your customers so they're more prepared for that.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
It's huge.
I mean, it's huge.
I think context is king, right.
Like they have to understand the reasons why you're pricing things.
You know, if you're price gouging your customer, that's going to get flushed out at some point in time anyways.
Right.
And you're going to get the boot.
I just saw a headline this morning I think was from the freight caviar guys about Kroger soon a all that.
Yeah.
So you know, you have to.
(11:59):
And taking the time to explain those to your customer not only builds a better relationship, but our job as brokers is what I always tell my not just my sales reps, but my ops team too.
Our job is to make sure that they have peace of mind.
That's all it is.
Right.
Like they need to understand that they can tender you a load and you are going to see through A to Z.
(12:20):
That's why our name's A to Z Anz Trucking.
But like you need to be able to schedule that properly communicate with them properly.
To your point, you know, a Friday for a Monday pick up less than a thousand miles.
You have to have a layover built in on that from a pricing perspective because the drivers, like, you know, sometimes I, I hear stories.
Well, the driver can just, you know, sleep at home for A night and it'll be good for him.
(12:42):
And it's like, yeah, but you don't understand what that does to his hours of service.
Like, like, you have to understand they're not just robots that get to go like this all day long.
You know, they have to comply with all of these different hours of service regulations and everything else.
And if you mess with that in the slightest bit, you affect their next load and their next load until they do a reset.
Right.
So explaining all of that context to those guys, usually from a contract standpoint, we will price things based off of best case scenario and then have that conversation.
(13:11):
Most shippers do multiple rounds, at least in the food and bev, have that conversation after the first round and then really dial it in with the buyers that you're working with.
At least for us, that's how it typically works.
Right.
And talk to those buyers and make sure, hey, if, you know, if you don't want any service disruptions, these are the days that are premium.
These are the days that work best for us to load based off of our current capacity.
(13:33):
If you need me to go source capacity outside of what we currently have, then there is a potential price increase for that.
And having those conversations up front, I think are golden.
It gives you another opportunity to talk to the customer too.
And it gives you another opportunity to let the customer know that you actually know what you're doing.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Is that often over?
Like, I know the answer to this, but like, you know, for the context of the listeners out there, how often is that overlooked?
And you know, from my seat, you know, I've heard this from numerous shippers of ours.
Right.
Is, is, you know, like at the end of the day, like, hey, we're a manufacturer, we're not a transportation company.
Like, this is why we hired you and you need to bring this to our attention.
(14:12):
And, and like, and I know that I use this term a lot, but like, this is another one of those things that I mean, like, I would rather take five minutes on the front end of a relationship to explain a lot of this stuff to a customer.
Or even in the heat of the moment, say you haven't.
And that comes up because like, there needs to be a justification behind like, hey, why is this exact same load now $400 more like you have to be able to explain that.
(14:36):
And again, more often than not, your customers are going to be no harm, no foul because they know why.
Right.
Like they know that you're not just throwing darts at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Like, no, this is why it is what it is.
Like, yeah, you might get lucky and find that one driver who lives in the receiving city who's going to do a shutdown at home and all of that stuff, right?
Like, you might get there, but chances are you're probably not.
(14:58):
And you know, again, it's, you need to keep this service at a higher level.
It's easy to say it, but I feel like, at least from my perspective, very few are executing upon it and having that conversation that you're describing right there, Cody.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Oh, I agree.
And, and from my experience on the other end of this, I would say probably close to 80 or 90%, because I can't count how many times we used to refer to them as paper rates, right?
The rate looks great on paper, but you're probably not going to be able to execute on it, right.
And I can't count how many times I would get a great rate up front.
And it took me probably a year to learn this when I was on the shipper side.
(15:33):
Like, you know, the best rate isn't always your best option, right?
A lot of those are paper rates.
And a lot of times I, you know, I can't count how many times they had to come mid bid with their hand open saying, you know, we're getting crushed here.
And it's like, well, if you're getting crushed, why did you bid so low?
Well, it's because that's where we thought the market was going to be at.
And Saddam always told me one, you either don't know what you're talking about or you just bid low to get on the lane and then you're hoping that midway through you're going to be able to have a conversation with me.
(16:00):
And, and happens, I understand that those things like market shift, nobody could have seen what happened in Florida, right?
Like, nobody could have predicted that.
But you know, Pacific Northwest, if you're not educated enough to know that produce in the Pacific Northwest, which pretty much includes Salt Lake all the way up, because there's onions and potatoes in Idaho and Salt Lake and all that fun stuff all the way up through Washington, if you're not educated enough to know that rates start to creep up mid August and they peak right around December, January, and you're not building that into your rates, then you shouldn't be bidding it.
(16:33):
And if your shippers don't know that, I mean, typically your shipper is going to know that they've been doing it for a while but if they don't know that, it is your job to help educate them on why you're bidding, what you're bidding, why you're pricing things the way that you're pricing them.
All shippers know that you have to have some sort of margin in there.
We've got lights we got to keep on, we've got Internet we got to pay for, we've got subscriptions to everything we got to pay for.
And we have people that we got to pay.
(16:54):
Right.
So they all know you got to have a margin.
But if you're going in with a 20 or 30% margin on a load, you know, spot's completely different.
Not going to talk about that.
But from a contract standpoint, if you're going in that high, you've got to be able to justify the reason for that.
Because maybe that 20 or 30% is taking into account that two or three months out of that year long bid, you're going to be in the negative.
(17:15):
Yeah, right.
You got to be able to explain that to them and they have to be able to understand it in real time, like layman's terms, instead of just saying this is the rate, you know, this is the rate that we get and like, cool.
Well, you know, you're the out of ten carriers, you're number nine on my pricing list.
So without that context of why that is, they're probably just going to go at the cheapest rate.
(17:36):
You're going to lose out an opportunity and that shipper is probably going to end up getting burned.
So to me, that's your opportunity to build that relationship of trust.
You know, I'm at a point with some of our shippers where if another carrier asks for a rate increase, the first person that they call is me and say, hey, what's going on in this market?
Like even for a lane, I don't run because they know that I'm going to be honest with them.
(17:56):
They know that I'm going to tell them like you're getting gouged or they bid too low or hey, you know, like the Florida thing that just happened, rates are crazy down there.
And you know, a lot of your dedicated capacity that was going into Florida before is now refusing to.
You can't change that.
You've got to communicate that to your customers.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
How are you guys out there kind of explaining where things are in the market and how you perceive them to trend here for the coming months?
Right, because it's like that.
I think the general consensus out there Is people know that they're on the verge of a change or like something is going to increase but nobody wants it to.
(18:35):
Right on the like whoever's benefiting the most from this.
But like how are you guys out there bringing market reports to your customer?
And, and you know, because like from my perspective, I've just found in like, and one, I mean a very big strategy of ours is like hey, we want to keep our rates like literally the exact same because like we filled out RFPs, but like our, the majority of our freight is spot market freight out there.
(18:59):
But again, I feel like there's a way to give contracted pricing in a spot market environment out there by keeping that same price time and time again.
And you know, for us from my seat, like we're kind of coming up on the end of flatbed season here.
We're pretty much through October and then it'll, you know, it'll dip off there from November through February and then as soon as the ground starts thawing off again.
(19:19):
But like, I look at it as is, there's a giant question mark on how much longer things are going to continue in this capacity out there.
How are you guys delivering any form of consistency to your guys customers right now?
Speaker 3 (19:34):
So we produce a market report.
If you don't follow us, we produce it on our website.
We also produce it on LinkedIn.
Bella Montoya, she's one of my team members, she actually produces the report, sends it to all of our customers, also publishes it out there.
And it's very food specific, you know, taken into the economy of what's going on with what we're seeing with food.
(19:55):
Very produce specific but we like to get in front of it.
And then also, you know, from an RFP standpoint because we, you know, everybody talks about RFP season, but unfortunately in food and produce, like it's RFP season every single month.
I mean I have, you know, I'm churning out probably three to four RFPs a week right now.
And with that it's the conversation of saying, hey, we're going to put our best foot forward.
(20:17):
We're going to go into this assuming that there is not going to be a major shift in the market during this time frame.
However, context, if that shift happens, we do have to have a conversation.
If you tell your customer that up front and let them know I'm putting my best foot forward, I'm trying to save you as much money as I possibly can without sacrificing service and taking care of my Carriers on top of that.
(20:38):
Because at the end of the day you still want the same driver showing up for most loads, gets to know the receiver, gets to know the shipper.
That's your best case scenario from a service level standpoint.
So you've got to price that accordingly.
But you also have to have that conversation with the shippers.
Right now I think in this market is this could shift at any time and this could be next month.
We could be looking at a, oh my God, everybody's pulling their hair out and you know, all of a sudden the spot market runs up and contracts getting defaulted on all over the place.
(21:05):
I don't think that's going to happen, personally.
I think the most important thing right now is the Fed interest rate.
Keeping that in mind and I am hearing that they, you were looking at least, you know, 25% or you know, a 25% or blah, blah,.25% drop in September, potentially one in October, potentially one in November and December.
(21:28):
We'll see how all that shakes out.
But I think that's going to lead to potentially an uptick in volume.
The good thing, at least on our end, we are pretty steady Eddie throughout most of the year because people always have to eat.
We don't really truck any luxury items.
But we also, I learned a long time ago flatbed.
(21:48):
Flatbed usually dictates how the rest of the year is going to go.
If you have a good start to the flatbed season in February and March, which is usually the kickoff for housing.
Right.
Because the grounds thawed and all that stuff and everything outside of Arizona and Florida and Texas, you know, starts to go up.
What if you can see that trend, you know that dry ban and reefers are probably four to six months behind that.
(22:13):
Yeah.
So we keep an eye on those things.
We report on the flatbed market because that usually is a leading indicator as well as anything economically that we can that sometimes these guys aren't digesting because you know as well as I do there's so much damn clickbait out there, you don't know what to trust.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Dude, it's alarmingly high.
It really is.
And you know, and you know, because like from my perspective we're hearing from, I like, I'm not even over exaggerating here.
99 of our prospects are.
They have all directly, not indirectly directly said this year was about 40 to 50% slower than we had anticipated from overall freight volumes out there.
(22:51):
And again like we're like from a business development perspective like, we're having a lot of success in like getting in with the decision maker in the, in regards of like, we're having conversations with them.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
That doesn't mean that we're getting set up and they're like, oh, hey, here's all this freight.
But we've heard it from like, legitimately, man, 99 of our prospects have all said in one percentage or another, like 40 to 50% slower.
Like, the majority of them were like, we should be working 65 hours a week.
Right now we're barely getting 40.
And it's so like, to me, that is the big thing.
(23:25):
And like, and I'm right there with you in regards to interest rates because I look at it from like a cost to hold inventory perspective.
And then like, how much more willing are they going to be risked or how much more willing are they going to be to take that risk to pre order a bunch of inventory as well, to get it in there in that anticipation?
And you know, I think, like, it's very evident where things are right now.
(23:47):
And, and I think like, a lot of people need to caution because, like, you see, they're like, oh, Trump's been in office for eight months now.
Why isn't the world fixed?
And it's, you know, it's one of those things, like, it takes a lot of time.
And I, I understand that.
I think more than most people are wanting to admit that it completely, I think, rests on the shoulders of the Fed and lowering the interest rates out there because that's going to give people more even consumer spending.
(24:14):
Like you said out there about, like, which you said earlier, Cody, about produce.
Right?
Like, how many people weren't buying fresh produce this year because it wasn't in their budget?
They couldn't afford it.
Right.
And your numbers there that you're describing is the only proof that I needed.
That's probably the case, right?
Because they're like, why would I buy that when I could get it, you know, frozen for cheaper or whatever that looks like, right?
(24:36):
Or they're just not buying fruit at.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
All at this point.
Yeah, I mean, that's like, I'm guilty every single week that I make my Costco run and I buy one of the big things of strawberries, right?
Every, every single Sunday that I go and I do that, I think, okay, by the end of the week we're going to buzz through this.
By the end of the week, probably a quarter of it's bad, right?
Because we eat through most of it and then so that type of stuff.
If you compound that with the pricing of everything, people started shifting their buying habits to frozen strawberries.
(25:02):
I actually started doing that for my smoothies and stuff.
Like, why have fresh when I can have a bag of frozen, a giant bag of frozen for a month in my freezer.
Right.
And so I think a lot of that happened this year because pricing has.
Has been completely out of hand for the last four years.
I mean, inflation's been crazy.
So.
But I, you know, for example, were seeing boxes of lettuce, for example, just iceberg last year, hovering around 45 to 50 bucks a case average.
(25:31):
The last four years has been anywhere between 30 and 50.
We were seeing it lower than 20 bucks a case this year.
This summer, were seeing cherries, a typical load of organic cherries.
You're talking 150 to $200,000 in value.
We were seeing under a hundred thousand dollars for the first time in the eight years that I've been doing this.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Explain that.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Like, demand.
There was no demand.
And so when I know, at least at the tail end of the Yuma season last year, most of the growers that I know were taking losses on most of their product because it was like they were so close to the end of the season.
It's like, do we either till this back up into the ground and just completely not make any money off of it, or are we going to take 50% of the value just to move the product and get.
(26:16):
And get some sort of revenue coming in?
And they were doing that.
And, you know, I. I was golfing not too long ago with one of my really good friends over in Castroville.
And what he told me, he's been doing this for 30 years.
He was actually.
He actually founded a company over there, I'm not going to mention.
But what he was telling me was, he said that this was the slowest summary he's seen in 20 years.
(26:36):
Oh, wow.
And so, and we felt it too.
I mean, definitely, you know, our produce volume was down.
We made up for it and some other volume, but our produce volume was definitely down this season.
And it's just.
It is what it is.
You get, you take those lumps.
Good news is hopefully, at least from the numbers that we're seeing from the Yuma season, we should have a good harvest again.
(26:59):
That's one part of the equation.
The other part of the equation is where's demand going to fall?
nobody really knows where that's going to fall yet.
A lot of that to both of our points is where's interest rates going to fall?
Where's consumer spending going to fall?
The more people eat out and eat their salads, the more you go to Olive Garden, get your never ending salad, the more I move produce, right?
So, but the less people do that, the more cost conscious people are and they're buying that frozen food and they're buying the canned food because it's shelf stable and they're not losing money on it.
(27:27):
The less and less we see on the fresh side.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
What is one as we're wrapping up here, Cody, what's one piece of advice you would give out to sales reps right now?
Whether they're developing business or maybe they got new, you know, newer relationships.
What is one thing that you would like to see more people focus on where they're going to see some value out there in the market with their customers?
Speaker 3 (27:50):
I think, you know, part of that would be context.
Like were talking about.
Make sure that you guys are educated on what you're talking about and not just, you know, going for the race to the bottom.
Like not all business is great business and then nobody wins when you're just trying to undercut each other by $0.05 per mile here.
The only, you know, the people who lose the most are the carriers, quite frankly.
And the more carriers you put out of business, the harder it's going to be to do your job six months from now.
(28:13):
So context is king.
Price it correctly.
And also like, just think, keep things in perspective.
Like right now, if you can land a contract to where you're actually set up with somebody, you don't necessarily have to be moving freight tomorrow with them, but it allows you to at least be there when they need you.
When they have those, you know, those effort Fridays where they get 20 loads given back to them and they need somebody there.
(28:38):
We've seen that, we've had success with that this year.
Probably more than actually getting set up with somebody, going through the normal RFP process and all, everything, just building those relationships and making sure that you're an option for those guys when they need you.
And I think that's the most important thing right now.
It also allows you to have those conversations with them.
We used to call it contract hunting, right?
Like make sure you get the contract, make sure you get the setup paperwork done and then after that wait for the market to improve slightly or wait for someone to fail.
(29:08):
I just met with somebody over the weekend that's a large customer of ours and was informed, hey, this coming Yuma season, we had a lot of Salinas carriers and in typically Salinas and Yuma, the same carriers, same brokers are going to be bidding on the same lanes, have major service failures.
And because of that, we are going to see a shift of up to 20% in those incumbent lanes.
That's an opportunity for us.
(29:28):
Right?
And that's an opportunity for new carriers and new brokers to get in there as well.
Just, just make sure you can get set up with those guys, make sure you're having the dialogue and don't rush anything right now.
I can tell you if you go in right now with rock bottom rates, you will get burned in the next six to 12 months.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
100%, dude.
Couldn't agree more.
Cody, thank you so much, man.
I appreciate the insight as always.
And what's going on out there in produce?
How does anybody reach out to you guys to find out more?
Are you guys hiring or anything like that?
Throw that out there.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah, always looking for great sales reps, operations.
We are actually hiring, but we're hiring in the Raleigh market right now in office.
And Outside of that, LinkedIn is the best way to contact me or my sales reps or anybody.
Obviously you can go to anzietrucking.com, contact me there as well.
But LinkedIn is the best.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Perfect.
Sounds good.
If you guys can't find Cody or Anz trucking out there on LinkedIn, hit me up.
I will gladly put you guys in contact with them, but that's going to be it for today.
Ladies and gentlemen.
As always, if you got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show, you guys.
And if you're feeling really ambitious after this one, rank the show on itunes and Spotify.
Because if you see value, your network's going to see it as well.
I appreciate you guys.
I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Came back with a bank Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the lane moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them hate them Make a bigger boss hey.
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