Liberty Fruit Co. Inc. in Kansas City, MO, is a full service produce distributor providing delivery services to foodservice, retail and wholesale customers across an eight state area in the Midwest.

“We did over 4.5 million miles last year in transportation miles,” said Scott Danner, chief operating officer, in an interview with The Produce News July 22.

The company currently runsScott Danner a fleet of 52 leased trucks. Thirty of them are straight trucks, and the remainder are tractor-trailer rigs.

“I can’t afford, if I am traveling down to Dallas [for example], to have a truck broken down,” Mr. Danner said. “Our windows of delivery and time of service and everything else are so tight. We can’t afford a breakdown.”

For that reason, reliability figured prominently in the company’s decisions to ink a full service lease with PACCAR Leasing (PacLease) for its fleet of Kenworth trucks.

“We have done that for many years now, to make sure the truck is always running,” he said. “It is very important.”

Liberty Fruit pays “a little extra” for the full service leasing, he said, “But our service level and reliability with those trucks” is such that “we rarely have an issue.”

Liberty Fruit, founded in 1965, is a family business that has been experiencing significant growth as well as an expansion of its geographic reach over the last several years. During the past fiscal year, which ended in June, the company surpassed $100 million in sales for the first time.

“Recently, we have done an expansion in our processing plant, and we have also expanded our repack operation by 15,000 square feet,” Mr. Danner said. “We have plans to expand some more, because of our growth in business. Last year, we experienced about an 18 to 20 percent growth.”

The company currently has more than 350 employees, he said. Although it has more of a corporate structure than in the past, “we are trying to still have that family feel in how we go to market,” he said.

Liberty Fruit uses “all our own drivers” to drive the trucks, Mr. Danner said. At one time, the company looked at other alternatives, “but it is so much more expensive, and we really like to have full control. We don’t even use anybody on the outside doing our inbound trucks. We contract all of our inbound freight with carriers from all over the country.”

For outbound trucks, “we have a system called Roadnet for routing and for tracking our trucks, so we know exactly where all of our trucks are at any time. We also know delivery time, delivery windows, and what percent we are delivering outside of those customer windows every day.”

After instituting Roadnet, efficiencies improved, he said. “What we found was we had much more efficient loads, so we cut down on how many trucks were needed” and also on the number of miles driven.

“Our footprint and our model have changed” in recent years, Mr. Danner said. “It used to be skewed to straight trucks and very few trailers, but as we migrated into doing more warehouse stops and warehouse deliveries, we changed and are doing more tractor-trailers.”

The margins are narrower with the warehouse deliveries, he said, “but the drop sizes are huge, and the dollars per load are much more” and of course, it is more efficient to make bigger drops at fewer locations.

“For a tractor-trailer, I would say our average is three to four stops,” he said. “For a straight truck, it could be anywhere from 10 to 15 stops.” In most cases, but not always, the straight truck deliveries are foodservice related, “but we do also co-mingle foodservice and retail on the same trucks, and possibly even wholesale.”

Asked the secret of managing such a complex logistics challenge, Mr. Danner replied, “Having the right people who are intelligent and smart enough and can do their jobs well, without being micromanaged.”

At Liberty Fruit, “we have some of the best talent in the country,” he continued.

“They know what they need to do, and the majority of the time, they get it done right.”