Control of conditions determines delivered product quality for produce wholesalers such as Hardie's Fruit & Vegetable. Offering its customers a three-day warranty on every delivery, the Dallas, Texas, distributor takes no chances on out-of-range temperature or humidity from end to end in the distribution chain. The company even puts its name and logo on 10 of the trailers used by the for-hire carrier who hauls its inbound produce.
Hardie's is not new to the produce business, having been started in 1943 by the father of the present owner and president, David Hardie. “Our involvement with produce goes back long before this company,” he says. “My grandfather and great grandfather also had produce businesses in Dallas, going back almost to the turn of the 20th century. I'm named for my grandfather who died in 1938 just about the same time I was born. I'm the fourth generation of the Hardie family here and the last male, but I have four daughters; and two of them and their husbands are part of the business. There are a lot of old companies in Dallas, but this is the oldest one in produce distribution still owned and operated by the family that started it.”
Hardie's projects sales to be $40 million in 2002, up from $34 million in 2001. “We were on track to generate $36 million last year, and then the terrorists attacks knocked the support out from under the economy that supports the foodservice business,” Hardie says.
The company is a part of the Pro*Act USA purchasing cooperative. Based in Salinas, California, Pro*Act has 52 member companies nationwide.
Serving northeastern Texas
Hardie's serves foodservice accounts in Texas and Louisiana north of Interstate 20 from Wichita Falls, Texas at the western edge of the trade area to Monroe, Louisiana, at the eastern edge. To serve that 400-mile wide swath of territory, Hardie's uses 40 straight trucks. It bases four at a satellite distribution point in Shreveport, Louisiana, and runs the remaining 36 from Dallas. “We split the territory in East Texas,” says Vernon Buie, Hardie's general manager. “Our Dallas trucks go as far east as Tyler. The Shreveport trucks come west to Kilgore. The two towns are about 30 miles apart.”
Within that territory, Hardie's serves about 350 accounts, making more than 3,000 deliveries a week from an inventory of more than 1,300 line items. The company makes so many more stops a week than the number of customers might suggest, because many of the accounts are multi-location chains. Hardie's has a heavy concentration of casual dining chain restaurants on its account list.
Trucks make an average of 10 to 16 stops per route six days a week. Orders in the warehouse by 5 pm are ready for dispatch by 4:30 the following morning. With a load that carefully matches customer specifications, drivers are at the delivery points for only 10 to 15 minutes a stop. About one-third of the Dallas fleet is used for a second route of afternoon deliveries.
Two distributors in one building
The warehouse is part of a single building housing two produce distributors. Hardie's uses 44,000 sq ft of the building. The remaining 250,000 sq ft belongs to Standard Fruit and Vegetable, another old-line Dallas produce house. Having the two companies located side-by-side is advantageous to Hardie's, because Standard is a shorts or fill-in distributor, selling to other distributors that need certain lots of product to fill in their usual inventory. Often a produce purchase at Hardie's is as easy as going next door to Standard to get it.
About four years ago, Hardie's became one of the first distributors to test a new wireless warehouse temperature monitoring system from a Dallas company known as FreshLoc Technologies. The system uses individual temperature monitors that can be placed in lots of produce as they are received and placed in storage. These wireless monitors constantly report temperature to the central warehouse management system.
Using preset temperature and humidity parameters for each of the 14 chilled rooms in the warehouse, the FreshLoc system constantly updates product condition. If product goes above or below the preset parameters and remains out of range more than 20 continuous minutes, the system begins to set off a number of alarms, which include email messages to the manager on duty. Someone has to go into the warehouse and remedy the situation to stop the alarms. “You can't ignore it,” Buie says. “It makes noise and sends a constant stream of emails until the problem gets fixed.”
New fleet monitoring system
A more recent experiment involves a temperature monitoring and recording system for the fleet. It is known as FreshSync. About the size of a package of cigarettes, the FreshSync device monitors and records temperature from multiple locations in a truck or trailer. The small device in its Lexan plastic case mounts on the outside of the cargo box and connects to its sensors with fine wire leads. It is controlled by Hardie's dispatchers who turn it on as trucks are prepared for loading. The FreshSync data recorder is not turned off again until after a truck is precooled, loaded, makes its delivery route, and returns to the warehouse. Upon return from a route, the recording system automatically downloads a complete temperature picture of the day's deliveries when it comes within range of an antenna at the warehouse.
For self-contained distribution such as supermarket chains, the FreshSync recorder can be downloaded at a delivery destination such as a store. This data fed into the company computer network can provide an instant look at product temperature at the time of delivery rather than having to wait until the vehicle returns to a distribution center.
With the alarm system active while trucks wait for route departure, FreshSync provides constant load monitoring without sending someone into the yard to check refrigeration unit operation and box temperature.
The FreshSync recorders are designed for integration with existing FreshLoc wireless warehouse systems. They can be added to existing systems or installed as a stand-alone product. FreshLoc Technologies says that the infrastructure needed to support the FreshSync system costs about $1,000. Sensors on the trucks typically are rented by the month and pricing is based on the number of vehicles involved. A typical rental rate is less than $10 per truck per month, FreshLoc says.
Confidence from start to finish
The two products help provide a firm basis for confidence in produce quality, Buie says. “We know the condition of product at the source, because 90% of our inbound freight is handled by one company, Dwight Parker, a produce hauler from Hugo, Oklahoma. Parker's drivers are used to handling our freight and make an average of one trip a week for us.
“We know the condition of product in our warehouse, because we inspect it carefully at arrival and monitor it with FreshLoc while it's here. By the way, nothing is here long. We get an average of six inbound loads a day and turn almost the entire inventory three times a week. Even potatoes have a high turn rate; we ship a full trailer load of them every day.
“Finally, we know that product is well-protected during delivery. Not only do our systems monitor temperature, they set off an alarm in the truck cab if temperature goes out of range. Refrigeration units are set at 38° F for deliveries. If the problem cannot be corrected, we meet the driver with a substitute truck and transfer the load to a truck with a good refrigeration system. Using FreshLoc and FreshSync, we track every product complaint we get to its source. If we deliver product that a customer doesn't like, we have to know why, because we guarantee that product for three days after delivery. This is an after-the-fact investigation. We replace product first and find out why we had a problem later. The customer never gets involved.”
Reduced pre-cool time
Using FreshLoc and FreshSync has had some unintended, but pleasant consequences. For instance, Hardie's learned that it was letting refrigeration units run too long for pre-cooling prior to truck loading. “We've made adjustments and have seen a surprising reduction in the fuel we use to cool trucks before a trip,” Hardie says.
It takes more than electronic monitoring to delivery high quality produce. It takes good product loaded in good trucks. Hardie's sources its fleet from Bright National Lease in Dallas. Twenty- or 22-ft Kidron truck bodies, essentially dairy delivery bodies, are mounted on International chassis. Hardie's keeps trucks, bodies, and refrigeration units for only 6 1½2 years. At the end of the lease term, everything goes back to the leasing company. Buie says that remounting truck bodies on new chassis has too much potential for compromised insulation integrity after more than six years in the Texas heat.
Older trucks are 4900-series Internationals with DT-466 engines rated at 195 hp driving through synchronized Eaton manual transmissions. Older truck bodies have Thermo King MD-II refrigeration units. New trucks are equipped with Thermo King's new TS-500 unit with a scroll compressor.
Six new trucks are the 4300-series Internationals introduced to the market just last year. These also have the DT-466 engine, but use the new Allison 3060P automatic transmission. Automatic transmissions are becoming a necessity for foodservice delivery, because so few potential drivers know how to operate an unsynchronized manual gearbox, Buie says. In addition, the fuel economy of trucks with automatics is better and maintenance costs are lower, he says.