When you’re shipping perishables like produce, the stakes are high; even a one-day delay can ruin an entire truckload of food.

Colby Varley, vice president and principal at Advanced Transportation Services (ATS), explains what’s going on in the perishable freight world and how logistics companies and shippers can work together to make sure every load arrives in perfect condition.

The COVID-19 pandemic shook up the freight shipping industry, and now that things have settled, loading efficiency is the name of the game. Colby explains, “[During] COVID … they were shipping whatever they could, whether it was half a truck or a quarter of a truck. They were just shipping it. Since then, that trend has reversed. Now everybody is maximizing their cube space.”

But he’s seen a troubling pattern lately: certain types of produce haven’t been doing well, with some freight companies struggling to fill trucks.

“[For] the Mexican grape crop, they're estimating about a 2 million box loss out there. … [If] you take 2 million boxes out of the equation, that's a lot of trucks that aren’t going to get loads. … We've had trucks every week deadheading back to California to come pick up a load because there's just nothing there."

Colby’s advice for freight companies? Choose a specialty and stick with it. “Stay in your niche, stay in your lane, and become the expert in that field, whether you're doing dry freight, doing bulk tanker, [or] doing flatbed.”

He uses ATS as an example: “The markets fluctuate all the time. But we just stay true to highly perishable food and produce.”

Growers looking for the best deal on freight shipping might be tempted to spring for a good deal. But low costs can come with risks, especially with cargo as volatile as fresh fruits and vegetables. According to Colby, great service is worth paying for.

“Service is the number one thing. And we do have to charge a little bit more for that. … On any produce shipment, the difference between being one day late is the difference of that produce making it through quality control [or] not.”

• Connect with Colby on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colby-varley-5ba57a69/
• Visit Advanced Transportation Services’s website: https://advancedtransportationservices.com/

Most retailers view returns as a necessary evil. You have to offer returns to stay competitive, but accepting unwanted or damaged products—and shipping replacements—drains resources and wastes time.

What if it didn’t have to be that way?

In this episode, Virgil Ghic, co-founder of WeSupply, makes a bold claim: returns don’t have to be a cost center. In fact, with the right strategy, they can even drive revenue!

If you want returns to be profitable, you can’t just implement a cookie-cutter policy.

Virgil explains, “If [you] are just offering a 30-day return policy, no questions asked, the chances of making it profitable are none. Most likely you're just going to lose a lot of money. But if you are designing the experience, designing the outcomes, designing the logistics behind the scenes … then you're going to have a profitable [policy]. Even if it's not profitable, you are going to decrease the cost significantly.”

Virgil shares two ideas for making returns profitable: encouraging customers to choose store credit and allowing in-store returns.

• Store credit. To encourage buyers to shop from your store after making a return, Virgil recommends incentivizing store credit rather than cash back. “[Let’s say] you have a $100 item that you are exchanging for an $80 item. You can offer [the remaining $20] as a refund, [or] you can offer $25 as store credit.”
• In-store returns. People who walk into the store to return a product usually end up purchasing something else. So if you have brick-and-mortar locations, make sure the in-person returns experience is smooth and convenient.

Of course, the best way to handle returns is to prevent them in the first place. For that, you’ll need data—lots of it. “If you have the data, you can look into it and … analyze it. You can take action on it.”

For example, consider a dress that lots of people return because of sizing issues.

“[Saying] it doesn't fit doesn't tell you anything. … If we are just asking the customer [is it] too big or too small, that's not actionable. Nobody knows what to do with that data.”

The solution? Get specific. Ask the customer exactly why the fit is wrong, then adjust the dress or refine the sizing description on your website. “[Once] you understand [the issue] … you give [the product] back to the merchandising team or the manufacturing team, and they can do adjustments. And they can maybe say on the website, this model runs big or runs wide.”

• Connect with Virgil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virgilghic/
• Visit WeSupply’s website: https://wesupplylabs.com/

So far, 2025 has kept us on our toes, especially with all the uncertainty surrounding tariffs. But in this episode of Unboxing the Trends, Lori and Tim take a break from the tariff talk to discuss three major trends from June: warehouse automation, carrier shifts, and drone deliveries.

Listen to this 15-minute episode to get up to date with the latest shipping and logistics happenings!

As of last month, Amazon has deployed over a million robots in their warehouses. As Lori points out, robots now outnumber human workers! It might sound a little dystopian, but automation is incredibly helpful for businesses—as long as they don’t neglect their human employees.

Lori recommends, “Don’t just drop some tech in without training. Make sure that your people are part of the process.”

UPS and FedEx have each made changes to their relationships with Amazon. “UPS has pulled back a whole bunch from its Amazon business,” Lori explains, “while FedEx has picked up a bunch of the Amazon volume.”

What does that mean for your shipping?

“If you're super UPS dependent, you might see maybe a little bit of disruption … maybe some reliability concerns. On the flip side, if you are heavily dependent on FedEx, you'll have steady operation that's expanded, but you might face tighter capacity.”

Walmart has partnered with Wing to offer drone delivery to over 100 new stores across major metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta.

This signals that drone delivery may be moving past the “novelty stage [and] expanding into something that people are starting to use and expect.”

But don’t get too excited yet. It remains to be seen whether drone delivery will take off or fall flat. The two determining factors: regulations and cost-effectiveness.

• Connect with Lori on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loribboyer/
• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-ranagan-mba-2717bb125/
• Visit EasyPost’s website: https://www.easypost.com/