Gregory Family Express specializes in hauling fresh and frozen with modern fleet and technology
Gregory Family Express specializes in hauling fresh and frozen with modern fleet and technology
If a company that relies on ASAP deliveries needed to make sure there was always guaranteed coverage from a transportation standpoint, what would be the best way to ensure that? Start a subsidiary company that specializes in trucking.
That’s exactly what Nickey Gregory, president of Atlanta’s Nickey Gregory Co., did in 2013 with the launch of Gregory Family Express, a full service fresh and frozen hauler that serves the Southeast and Northeast with daily deliveries.
The Nickey Gregory Co. is a full service distributor and repack specialist with a second location in Miami, a tomato repack operation in College Park, GA, and its own fleet of trucks. Gregory Family Express maintains a similar fleet but with additional capacity to transport frozen goods.
It’s a terrific pairing that means no customer is ever left in the lurch.
“We started GFE because a customer of ours would ask us to do emergency runs with frozen food,” said President Nickey Gregory.
“The emergency runs became regular runs, then those started conflicting with Nickey Gregory Co. runs,” he continued. “It works because we go can go to a lot of areas — we can go to the northeast and pick up fruit, or to Philadelphia and get mushrooms and haul them to our Miami location, then bring produce back to Atlanta from there and start the process all over again.”
“If the Nickey Gregory Co. runs short on drivers when we have big days or have to get reloads picked up, we’ll lean on GFE vs. hiring an outside carrier,” said Vice President of Marketing and Business Development Andrew Scott. “That guarantees our drivers know and understand produce, unlike outside carriers who may not deal with it regularly. In fact, a lot of the GFE drivers were originally Nickey Gregory Co. drivers.”
GFE specializes in hauling fresh and frozen product along the Eastern Seaboard, with new trucks, electronic log books, satellite tracking and constant cold chain monitoring.
“Technology takes a lot of room for error out of the picture,” Gregory said. “Say a driver is sleeping. If the monitor detects a change in temperature, it will alert the dispatcher, then they can call the driver and say, ‘Look at that unit.’”
At the end of the day, GFE “gives us another outlet for transportation that is still owned by us, which lets us keep a tight rein on our trucks and transportation,” Gregory said. “When it comes to shipping, it doesn’t matter whether it’s our product or somebody else’s under contract, we get it there when it supposed to be there the way they want it delivered.”
