She runs three refrigerated vans out of a warehouse that used to be a produce packer's, delivering specialty cheese to about forty accounts across two states — small groceries, a handful of restaurants, a couple of cheese counters that order twice a week. Her business has never been about volume. It's been about being the distributor who still answers when a twelve-wheel-of-order account calls with a Tuesday problem.
This month that model got expensive fast. National diesel prices set a record in early March, hitting $4.849 a gallon in one federal transportation report — and milk pricing has been firm enough this year that trade coverage has flagged dry whey values at their strongest since 2007, which only makes the freight math more visible by comparison. Her fuel line has climbed enough that a route she used to run without thinking now needs a spreadsheet. Her first instinct, like a lot of distributors this spring, was to pass a flat surcharge to every account. Her second thought was that a flat surcharge would hit her smallest, most loyal customers hardest — the same accounts least able to absorb it.
What she did instead
Rather than raise everyone's price the same amount, she spent a week mapping every stop against its order size and delivery frequency, then redrew the routes around density instead of habit. Accounts that had always gotten a Tuesday-and-Friday delivery because that's how it had always been done got consolidated where the volume supported it. A cluster of three small shops within four blocks of each other that had been on three separate routes went onto one.
It wasn't painless. Two accounts lost their twice-weekly cadence and had to adjust their own ordering rhythm, and she had an uncomfortable call with one longtime customer about it. But the fuel cost per stop dropped enough that she didn't need the across-the-board surcharge she'd been dreading — just a smaller, targeted one for the handful of standalone accounts too far off any efficient route to consolidate.
"You can't out-earn a bad route," is roughly how she put it to us. "You can only fix the route."
The part worth borrowing
Not every member runs delivery vans, but the underlying move applies more broadly than logistics: when a cost goes up across the board, the easy answer is to spread the increase evenly, and the harder, better answer is usually to look at where the cost is actually concentrated and address that specifically. A flat surcharge is simple to explain. A redrawn route is more work upfront and better for the relationships that matter most.
She's not done — she's watching fuel prices week to week like everyone else and isn't ready to call the new routes permanent. Milk prices have been trending upward this year too, according to the federal dairy outlook released in early 2022, which means member creameries on the other end of her routes are seeing better checks even as their delivered costs rise — a reminder that a good year on paper can still hide a squeezed middle. Three weeks in, her fuel spend per delivery is down noticeably, and she hasn't lost an account over it.
If freight costs are forcing changes to how you deliver or how your distributor delivers to you, the Membership & Outreach Committee is a good place to compare notes with members working through the same math.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.