Beverage Trucks: Let’s Drink To ’Em!
Make it water, though, as that’s still a growth area in this biz.
ED THOMAS
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Cheers! Salute! Prosit! Here’s looking at ya! Here’s mud in your eye! Down the hatch! In multi-cultural America, how many ways can we toast our drinking friends? And that’s just with alcoholic beverages like beer, wine and hard liquor.
Bottled water and soft drinks of many sorts also help comprise the beverage industry, which racks up sales well into the tens of billions annually. We are thirsty, and we don’t want to go far to buy our favorite quenchers. Thankfully, trucks take ’em to places close by.
While there aren’t as many types of trucks as there are beverages, or even toasts, trucks do vary. Intercity and interstate haulers use traditional semitrailers, either vans or reefers, to carry canned and bottled beverages from producers to markets. Truckload carriers do a healthy business transporting products from breweries, wineries and bottling plants to distant distribution centers, where other trucks take the products to retail outlets.
Such products are usually palletized and comprise both fronthauls and backhauls, depending on the operation and where a particular truck might be. We once met a lady owner-operator who was taking a truckload of Lone Star beer from San Antonio to Los Angeles, where she expected to pick up a load of Miller beer and take it to Dallas. That’s the result of consumers’ preference for some brands over others, and a byproduct of consolidation.
Since the 1960s, much of the beer brewing and soft drink industries has undergone massive consolidation. Most small local producers have disappeared, replaced by huge national brands and organizations. If you’re over 50, you can probably think of several local brands of beer and soda pop that went flat long ago.
Microbreweries are sometimes looked at as a reversal of that trend, but most microbrewed beer never leaves the premises, or if it does, barely makes it across town. True, some local brews may be distributed throughout a metro or multi-state area, and sometimes to select markets far away. But they are the exceptions.
Bottled water is one commodity that seems more local and regional than national. Travel the country and you’ll find brands peculiar to certain areas. They use major springs fairly close by and promote those waters as better tasting and perhaps healthier than what people can get from their municipal utilities or their own wells. That may or may not be true, as some suppliers mix a fairly small amount of spring water with treated tap water.
Bottled water is sold in stores and carried directly to consumers’ homes and businesses. Trucks employed in this carriage are some of the more specialized ones to be found in transportation. Low-slung bodies ride on low-profile chassis, both serving to keep the big, heavy jugs low in transit, which makes the trucks safer, and close to where drivers can reach them.
Bottled water trucks comprise a growing segment of the otherwise mature beverage truck business, says Wayne Childress, a sales executive at Mickey Truck Bodies in High Point, N.C. Mickey claims a 70% share of all beverage bodies and trailers, which are those specifically built to carry beverage products (vs. vans or reefers which of course can carry many other things).
Much of the rest of the business is serviced by Hackney, another North Carolina builder that is otherwise unconnected to Childress’ firm. Mickey was founded in 1904 to build wagons and furniture, and evolved into today’s operation. It builds about 3,000 truck bodies and trailers in a typical year, which it hasn’t seen lately (like many businesses, but that’s changing for the better).
Sales figures vary with the times, and are skewed by large orders placed by the various national accounts, he says. These are the soft drink producers like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Dr Pepper and some others, and their local or regional franchisees who bottle under license. They are big accounts in themselves.
Breweries almost always send their beer to local distributors, which run their own trucks. Breweries also produce tea and tea- type soft drinks under contract. We once helped haul a load of Arizona-brand flavored iced tea from Maryland to California. Whether beer or tea, such moves are in 48- or 53-foot vans, except of course for Coors, which sends out its unpasteurized beer only in temperature-controlled reefers.
The local route trucks operated by bottlers and distributors tend to resemble one another, except in color and lettering. They are boxy trucks or trailers with roll-up side doors over the bays, often taking up too much space on a street or lot — until we come to our senses and recall how important they are to our lifestyles. And as truck people, we can also appreciate they they vary in many details, as fleet managers develop preferences for truck makes and brands of components, just as in any other type of hauling.
Leasing companies are a growing force in beverage hauling, too, as the Ryders and Penskes of the country account for perhaps a third of all vehicles out there, according to a recent industry survey by Beverage World magazine.
As any social drinker knows, hard liquor and wine are packaged in bottles that fit into cartons, and therefore into vans for deliveries. Beer and soft drinks, however, are canned and bottled and sold in “packs” of six, eight or 12, and cases of 24, 30 or 36. These slip into cardboard trays that are sometimes shrink- wrapped together; these fit into the “bays” of specialized truck bodies and trailers.
Each vehicle has four to 12 bays, most of them accessed from the side to facilitate unloading at a curb or in a parking lot. You’ve seen route salesmen pulling out the cases, stacking them onto rubber-tired hand trucks and pushing them into stores where they’re placed in coolers and on shelves. Some truck and trailer bodies have rear compartments that hold palletized loads that are handled by forklifts, Childress explains.
If beverage trucks seem to have gotten bigger over the years, it’s because they have. Typically, 55% of production is beverage trailers and the rest is bodies for straight trucks. (A few of those are built to carry automotive batteries, but that’s another story.)
Medium-duty tractors and trucks supply the motive power, although with bigger and heavier loads, these days they’re likely to be Class 6 and 7 vehicles. Trucks have drop frames to accommodate the bodies’ high-cube designs. Thus there isn’t much second use for a beverage truck’s chassis except to haul beverages for a second and less well-heeled beverage distributor.
The truck or tractor might well be a low-cab-forward type, as “beverage” is always one of the target applications mentioned by anyone selling LCFs in North America. The compact and highly maneuverable “low cabovers,” as they’re also called, make a lot of sense running city streets and alleys. Of course, short-BBC conventionals are also popular.
Kick the tire of a beverage truck and you might bruise a toe. The tires are often specially made with beefy sidewalls and tread rubber to take the abuse of potholes and curbs. Route trucks are hard on tires, and mastering their management is among the triumphs of a good beverage fleet executive.
Trucks and tractors are likely to have midrange diesels running through automatic transmissions. According to that magazine survey, 73% of the more than 14,000 beverage vehicles represented had automatics, mostly tried-and-true Allison automatics. However, a small but apparently growing number were automated mechanicals, which sell for less money and deliver many of the same work-easing benefits for the driver.
Better known as a route sales person, that man or woman’s duties only include those of driver. An automatic transmission makes driving even hefty rigs in urban traffic a lot easier, so true sales people with smiling faces and bubbling personalities, rather than gruff truckers, can be recruited for the jobs. Indeed, beverage trucks were one of the first types to embrace Allison automatics when they were first marketed more than four decades ago.
Ever think of any of all this when you pop open a can or bottle of your favorite drink? No? Then lift your glass and let’s toast the beverage trucks and the guys and gals who drive ’em and keep ’em goin’.
One for the road, Pal!
