Talk to enough produce shippers these days and the same frustration surfaces quickly: trucks are harder to find, and they cost more when you do find them.
Reefer fleets are consolidating or shutting down. Owner-operators are aging out faster than new drivers are entering the industry. Those still hauling face fuel costs, insurance premiums, and financing terms that are increasingly difficult to sustain, making them more selective about which shippers they serve and which lanes they run.
That selectivity weighs on produce, for reasons rooted in basic constraints. Auto parts can sit in a warehouse for days. Strawberries start their clock the second they’re picked.
The result is a tightening transportation market with little margin for error, arriving just as seasonal harvests demand the most reliable capacity.
Produce Haulers Feel It Most
Since late 2022, roughly 39,000 trucking companies have shut down, federal data shows, representing more than 10% of the carrier pool.
Yet these data points don’t fully capture what produce shippers lost. A disproportionate share of those exits came from smaller, specialized operators, the kind who’d been hauling fruits and vegetables for decades. Many of the carriers left standing are larger, more generalized, and far less interested in the nuances that come with perishables.
As those operators exit the market, the remaining pool of produce-capable haulers has narrowed. Veteran drivers continue to age out, while fewer younger entrants are choosing a segment that demands long hours, strict temperature control, and little tolerance for error. The result is a system with less depth and far less flexibility than it once had.
The strain shows up clearly in pricing. Reefer spot rates climbed back above $2.00 per mile by spring 2025 and reached $2.05 in May, the highest level in three years. Seasonal surges now expose just how little slack remains in the system.
Michael Laws, president of Laws Logistics, a Naples, FL logistics provider, has taken note of the pattern. “The big carriers will only haul produce on a really limited basis,” he says. “As soon as the market gets tight, they’ll exit produce for cleaner freight.”
That exit happens fastest during harvest peaks in Florida, Arizona, and the Pacific Northwest, when rejections climb and spot prices spike. Even a flat market tightens fast when supply keeps draining.
The Driver Shortage Is Likely to Get Worse
Fewer carriers mean fewer trucks. The American Trucking Associations (ATA) estimates the U.S. is short roughly 80,000 drivers right now. If current trends hold, that gap could hit 160,000 by 2030.
Bob Costello, ATA’s chief economist, has been blunt about what that means. If the industry doesn’t address it, the shortage “will become a main cause of a future supply chain crisis,” he told TruckingDrive, an industry news publication, back in 2021.
Recruiting has never been easy, and the structural problems now run deeper. The average driver is in their 50s, turnover remains high, and women still make up less than 8% of the workforce. At the same time, regulatory enforcement continues to shrink the qualified driver pool.
Produce compounds the challenge, because simply put, you can’t just throw a newly licensed truck driver into a reefer full of ripe avocados and expect things to go well. It takes years to train drivers for this industry, along with specialized knowledge and expertise.
Laws sees the crunch coming fast. “I’m really worried about this summer,” he says. “I think the trucks will be difficult to find and that pricing will go through the roof.”
He offers a concrete example to frame where things are: a mid-size grower who paid an $8,000 truck rate to New York last season might face $13,000 this coming summer. “Can he afford that? I have my doubts, because it’s simply supply and demand,” he opines.
Running a Truck Is Getting Harder
Many trucking companies are stretched thin kicking off 2026, and the cost of keeping trucks moving has climbed to the point where something has to give.
For shippers, that shows up in two ways: rates keep rising, and reliability keeps slipping. The American Transportation Research Institute tracked average operating costs at $2.26 per mile in 2024, near historic highs.
Even excluding fuel, costs remain at record levels, driven by higher labor, insurance, and maintenance expenses. Carriers incurred losses for two years. Now they’re raising rates where they can and deferring expenses where they can’t.
Equipment is aging as fleets struggle to replace trucks amid higher prices and tighter credit. Used values have fallen since the 2021 peak, and potential tariffs on imported trucks and parts could further raise replacement costs.
Laws says that many fleets tend to cut maintenance costs first. “It’s gone by the wayside,” he adds. He has watched breakdowns climb, particularly tire failures, which produce simply can’t absorb without losing shelf life.
Worse, Laws estimates that a large share of produce is hauled by trucking companies that have 10 trucks or fewer.
For Produce, Tight Trucking Means Volatility and Spoilage
All of this lands somewhere, and for produce, it lands hard. Trucks move 83% of agricultural freight by tonnage, according to a 2020 USDA report.
Higher freight rates translate directly into higher produce prices. During harvest peaks, when reefers run short, rate spikes ripple through as brief waves of inflation that hit consumers, squeeze retailers, and roll margin pressure downhill to growers.
The service failures sting just as much as the price increases. Tender rejections climb. Pickups run late. Loads sit longer at the dock, bleeding shelf life before they ever hit the road. Scheduling has also grown more chaotic, with last-minute changes delaying loads long enough to compromise freshness. Product that should arrive market-ready shows up with days already shaved off.
Big carriers make the problem worse by choice. When freight tightens, they pivot away from produce toward cleaner loads. Produce shippers get left fighting over whatever specialized small-fleet capacity remains.
Cross-border lanes pile on more complexity. Mexico supplies over 30% of U.S. fruit and vegetable imports by truck. Early 2025 saw IT outages and bridge protests push border delays to six to eight hours, long enough to spike spoilage risk and strain contracts. California’s emissions rules for refrigeration units require upgrades by 2029, adding cost pressure to reefer operations running western lanes.
Meanwhile, Laws sees retailers as “a little bit more reactive than proactive” on transportation, often pushing the problem back onto growers until the freight quote arrives and “they’re going to faint.”
Where The Pressure Forces Change
It is unlikely that the pressures bearing down on trucking will go away, but they are beginning to force changes that were long overdue. As capacity tightens, the market is becoming less forgiving of inefficiency and more rewarding of planning, transparency, and operational discipline.
Industry participants say some shippers are adjusting by placing greater emphasis on carrier loyalty, information sharing, load planning, and longer booking windows.
Shippers locking in trucks through long-term contracts and dedicated agreements have an edge over those bidding load by load. Some large retailers have expanded private fleets, though that comes with its own cost conundrums.
Costello has pushed a simpler point: cutting dock delays effectively creates capacity. Drivers who aren’t stuck waiting can haul more loads per week. Every hour saved at the dock is an hour back on the road.
Laws doesn’t mince words. “Just be honest,” he says, “and make information flow quickly. Don’t build dispatch schedules assuming everything goes right.”
He offered a scenario that plays out constantly. Dispatch tells the carrier the load will be ready at 3 p.m. Reality shifts, and product isn’t staged until 11 p.m. “That’s an eight-hour difference,” Laws said. “Eight hours is how much a driver can actually drive his truck on one shift.”
Real-time updates on load readiness let drivers plan their breaks and ETAs around reality. That improves utilization for carriers and earns goodwill that pays off when capacity gets scarce.
One concrete tactic: co-load temperature-compatible products to fill trailers and reduce per-unit freight costs. Laws frames the logic simply: “If my PO says I only got 10 pallets of strawberries, can I load nine pallets of lettuce on the back of it? Temperature compatible, no cross-contamination.”
Operations matter too. Adding second-shift loading windows, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., reduces dock queuing and matches driver schedules better than cramming everything into daytime hours.
Technology only helps if it drives decisions. Shippers adopting transportation management systems, AI-powered routing, and real-time tracking can cut empty miles and reduce last-minute spot buying. But the real value comes from sharing visibility across trading partners.
Every party could see “time, temperature, pack dates, and how many days are left on the shelf life,” Laws notes. Sensitive commercial details stayed hidden.
The payoff: faster exception handling when problems arise, smarter allocation of short-dated inventory, and fewer disputes when delays happen.
Laws also points to a broader effort worth tracking: Supply Chain of the Future, an initiative that focuses on reducing waste and improving information flow across produce logistics. “The one certainty about perishables is they’re gonna perish,” he says, so visibility helps “get a good home for the food while it still has some value.”
Relying on a single carrier or a single lane is a recipe for pain when capacity tightens. Shippers are shifting some less time-sensitive freight to intermodal options. Produce buyers are broadening sourcing to shorten hauls and reduce exposure to long-lane volatility.
Mixing large national carriers with regional players and brokers hedges provider risk. Diversifying suppliers and transportation partners helps absorb regional imbalances when one market tightens faster than another.
None of this points to a return to cheap or abundant trucking. But fewer carriers does not automatically mean worse outcomes. In many cases, it is producing fewer, more stable relationships, clearer expectations, and less tolerance for the race-to-the-bottom pricing that left the system fragile in the first place. The market may be harsher, but it is also becoming more transparent.
Less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers, which specialize in transporting shipments between 150 and 15,000 lbs, have already announced general rate increases of around 5% for 2026 contracts, although smart bidding and volume commitments often bring those numbers down.
Industry watchers describe 2026 as “bifurcated.” Shippers who plan ahead, optimize loads, and build carrier relationships may hold costs steady or even reduce spend. Those who don’t will pay more and get less reliable service.
The Road Ahead
Looking ahead, Laws sees more consolidation coming in produce transportation, with fewer direct carrier relationships available to growers. The middlemen will multiply. The Rolodex will shrink. Technology and AI will help with efficiency, he says, but “nothing replaces a personal interaction.”
His advice for weathering what’s ahead comes down to one word: collaboration. “You build resilience outside in and inside out.”