Trucker Ingrid Brown has a passion for community and bringing women into the industry
Key takeaways
- Brown drives for Blackjack Express, hauling refrigerated produce across the U.S.
- Brown actively contributes to industry safety campaigns, serves on the Women In Trucking Board, and advocates for more inclusive opportunities for women in trucking.
- Beyond her role behind the wheel, Brown engages in charity work and encourages women to explore trucking, emphasizing the industry's human and community-centered nature.
Ingrid Brown was driving large trucks for her father’s road construction company when she was 16 years old. Yet while she grew up working in the industry, according to her mother, she was never supposed to stay in it.
“I was supposed to marry a doctor, a lawyer. She did not want me to be a truck driver,” Brown said of her mother.
As a self-described “free bird,” Brown spent a few years working for her family, then tried her hand at multiple jobs. However, the independence of being a trucker led her back to the driver’s seat. She took a job driving across the country, and “as they say, the bug bites you,” she recalled. From then on, Brown threw herself headfirst into trucking.
Brown drives for Blackjack Express, a for-hire fleet out of Arkansas. Today, she primarily hauls refrigerated produce but has pulled freight in 49 states throughout her career, including hauling dynamite in snowy, icy Alaska. Her industry involvement includes sitting on the Women In Trucking Board of Directors, being a frequent guest on industry podcasts, a panelist speaker, and even a stint as an adviser for Peterbilt engineers on how to make a more woman-inclusive cab.
The love of a challenge
While hauling produce doesn’t sound as exciting as hauling dynamite, it’s still a challenging haul, and that’s what fuels Brown. Hauling perishable produce requires safety—because slamming on brakes can cause items, such as berries, to bruise easily—as well as the requirement that Brown act as a quality engineer.
The hauls require “checking expiration dates, checking temperatures, [and] checking packaging” for damage, she told FleetOwner.
For Brown, involvement in trucking doesn’t start and end behind the wheel. It’s that love of a challenge, along with a love of learning, that led Brown to attend broker school in 2008. She never planned to become a broker, but she attended broker school to “learn what brokers did, get the background stuff, and learn all of the programs.” This helped her grow her business as an owner-operator, she said.
She’s also spent time learning more about industry regulations. Brown has worked closely with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration since 2015, and she’s an FMCSA Voice of Safety, representing the industry in campaigns about road safety. She also helped advocate for herself and her fellow truckers in Washington, D.C., though she doesn’t call herself an advocate. “I just look at it as we help one another,” Brown said, “and that's all I'm supposed to do out here.”
Brown's industry impact
Brown’s impact on the industry and those around her is palpable. It's not a rare occurrence for Brown to be swarmed by audience members at the end of panels she’s spoken on, and my interview with her was interrupted twice with friends and colleagues wanting her attention outside her truck during an industry conference in Austin, Texas.
Not only is she popular outside her network, but even her employer, Blackjack Express, surprised her with a new truck to show what she means to the team. When she first saw the truck in the yard surrounded by all her coworkers, she knew the truck was meant as a surprise for her, and “I lost it,” she recalled. “All I could do was just sit and cry in the dirt.” The truck was built spec for spec exactly as she would have designed it for herself based on the conversations she’d had with her bosses over the years, daydreaming about the perfect rig.
“This truck represents what my whole career has been,” Brown said, while holding back tears. “It represents the hard work. I’ve felt like I’ve tried to give—I’m sure in my career, I've taken, of course—but you always want to end it on a note that you gave more than you took. And this truck just has that.”
Meeting the needs of her community
To Brown, trucking is all about people. It’s important for her to deliver quality products because of the person who will eventually buy them. But as a member of the trucking community, Brown acknowledges that trucking is also about everyone who helps get those products from place to place.
“There's more to trucking than just somebody driving down the road,” she explained. “Not only is there a human in [the truck], that's a mother or father or brother or sister. There's really a heart that goes with these trucks because there's somebody—whether it's an owner sitting at a desk, whether it's a dispatcher sitting at a desk, or it's the mechanic in the shop, or it's the driver, or it's a family of any of those—everybody has a heart and everybody has a need.”
Part of meeting that need for her community is Brown’s laundry list of annual charity work and charitable functions she and her truck attend. Part of meeting that need for her trucking community is encouraging other women to see the joy within the industry.
Brown said the trucking industry needs a big neon sign for women to “Come see!” what the industry has to offer. But until that neon sign begins flashing, she’ll be the one screaming, “Come see what I found!” within the trucking community.
About the Author
Jade Brasher
Senior Editor Jade Brasher has covered vocational trucking and fleets since 2018. A graduate of The University of Alabama with a degree in journalism, Jade enjoys telling stories about the people behind the wheel and the intricate processes of the ever-evolving trucking industry.