She plans routes for Midwest Specialty Dairy Distribution, and most Novembers she spends this week doing the same thing: laying a holiday delivery map over her normal one and figuring out which accounts get bumped to an earlier day so nobody's cave-aged order is sitting on a truck an extra afternoon. This November the map exercise is the same. The math underneath it isn't. She's short two drivers she expected to have, a third is out on a rotating quarantine schedule, and the refrigerated trailers she'd normally lease for the December surge are booked out further than she's ever seen them.
"Every year I tell the accounts December is tight," she said. "This year I'm telling them December is tight and also I don't have the truck yet." The national driver shortage isn't new — she's been hearing about it for years — but the pandemic has pulled it tighter from both directions: fewer people willing to take a new driving job right now, and more of her existing drivers cycling in and out on exposure-related time off than in any past holiday season.
Choosing who gets the earlier slot
Her answer this year is triage, done earlier and more visibly than usual. She's calling her retail accounts directly in November instead of waiting for a December scramble, walking each one through a real delivery window rather than the standard one, and asking upfront which of their holiday volume is genuinely fixed-date and which has a few days of flex. A cheese shop building a gift-box program around a specific ship date gets priority over a wholesale account restocking a case that can sit a day longer without anyone noticing. It's not a popular thing to say out loud to every customer, but she's found members respond better to an honest constraint stated early than a missed date discovered late.
She's also leaning harder on the producers she distributes for to tell her their real cut-off, not their optimistic one. A few creameries she works with have already told her their own gift-box push is running weeks ahead of a normal December, which means more volume is trying to move through her trucks earlier than usual — a small silver lining, since it spreads her tightest week out over two.
What she'd tell another distributor's routing desk
Her advice, for anyone else staring at a holiday map with fewer trucks than usual: build in the honest conversation before the tight week arrives, not during it. "Nobody's mad about a hard truth in November," she said. "They're furious about it on December 22nd." She's also started keeping a short list of backup refrigerated capacity — a regional carrier with unused reefer trailers most Decembers, a couple of members with cold storage to spare — so she has somewhere to turn before a shortfall becomes a missed delivery rather than after.
If you're a member on the shipping or receiving end of a distribution relationship this season, this is a good week to ask your own rep the same question she's asking her accounts: what's actually fixed on your calendar, and what has room to move. The Membership & Outreach Committee can connect distribution-side members comparing notes on capacity this December, and it's a shorter list than you'd think.
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.