Who ships canned goods, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships canned goods

Four packers at head offices and home plants. Seneca alone operates 21 packaging plants across the country.

Ask for the plant's traffic manager, and ask about both directions. Inbound is short, frantic and seasonal: raw crop from field to plant on a clock measured in hours. Outbound is palletized cans to distribution centres, steady and year-round. Most brokers only ever ask about one of them.

Where it hauls

Plants sit in the crop, not near the customer, because raw vegetables cannot travel far before they lose quality. That puts canning capacity in Wisconsin, Minnesota and New York for peas, corn and beans, the Midwest tomato belt through Indiana and Ohio, California's Central Valley for tomatoes and fruit, and the mid-Atlantic for a mix. Finished goods then run out to distribution centres nationally, which is the long-haul half. The packers to know:

How to open

Offering the inbound is the differentiator. Raw crop haulage is unglamorous, short and urgent, and a broker who will take it earns the right to quote the finished goods that run all year.

Qualifying questions

• Raw inbound or finished outbound? Two different jobs at the same address. Raw crop is short-haul, hours-critical and seasonal. Finished cans are palletized, year-round and long-haul. Establish which before you quote anything.
• What does a finished load scale? Canned goods are dense and a trailer weighs out well before it fills. Get the pallet count and the target gross, because this is the opposite of the cube-out freight in the same warehouse.
• Is the trailer food-grade? Even sealed cans move under food safety expectations. Expect questions about prior loads and washouts, and about whether the trailer is clean and odour-free.
• How is it palletized and stretch-wrapped? Cans shift and a collapsed pallet is a damaged load and a hazard. Confirm the pallet pattern and wrap standard, and whether they expect load bars.
• What is your pack window this year? It moves with the crop and the weather. Asking tells you when the inbound crunch lands and when the outbound starts, which is the whole calendar of the account.

When to call

June and July, before pack season opens. Once the crop is coming in the plant runs around the clock and has no capacity to onboard anyone. The finished-goods outbound then runs all year from the warehouse, so a seat won at pack is a lane that pays long after the fields are empty.