What's a day in the life of a local driver like?

I pull containers from the ports and railyards. The ports are Union so they work exactly 8-5 with a 1 hour lunch. I wake up at 0630, text my dispatcher at 0700 and wait for a reply. I normally work 0730-4ish, M-F. Some days are a little longer if I get the box out of the port just before they close, but I prefer my 7hr days, and my company knows it. Its been like this for almost 5 years now.

 

When I was doing foodservice it went like this:

0330 - Wake up, get ready for work, pack my lunchbox with a sandwich and 4 bottles of water. Log in to my handheld to see what my route looks like (details on stops/cases/pallets) and guestimate what size trailer I'll have based on how many pallets it says I have.
0430 - Out the door no later than this time.
0445 - Arrive at work, swap parking spaces with my tractor, go on duty and do my PTI.
0520 - My departure time, but my trailer is late as usual. Good thing I'm hourly. I park out of the way and chat with my coworkers while we wait for the shuttles to roll in.
0545 - Shuttles start rolling in, I find my invoices and separate them while the shuttle driver breaks his set.
0600 - Hook and PTI my trailer, make sure nothing inside is falling over, and toss my two-wheeler inside.
0630 - My first stop is usually about 30 minutes away. Twice a week it’s a place that requires delivery before 6am (which means if everything is on time, I’d arrive at 0550), so I apologize for being late and start running cases.
1200 - I continue to run my stops and deal with routing and warehouse bs all morning long, then I take lunch around noon. I just do it at the customer since I pack a lunch.
1345 - Twice a week I’d be done with all but one stop by this time, and this stop wouldn’t let me in until 2pm. So I’d sit in their parking lot while I scan out their order and clean up my trailer.
1415 - Done with that annoying customer and headed back to the yard.
1445 - Park my trailer, do a post trip, put my returns in the returns trailer
1500 - Swap my tractor into my parking spot and head home.

Overall not bad for a 4-day work week. I had some easier days (Tuesdays I was often done before 2pm) and some harder days (my Fridays could be all over the place and it wasn’t uncommon to use my 16-hour exemption). OT after 10 hours a day and on any extra days worked.

 

Food service seems like a racket. Long days, early mornings, and hustling the boxes. Guess that the trade off to being local.
I am starting the CDL process now and vow not to go over the road. I have looked at local jobs like LTL, and Food Service which I think I can get hired pretty easy there but it seems like it would be a killer. Love to get a local gig hauling food grade or even gas.

I am trying to tune my career so I don't make any errors I can't recover from.

Once I get my CDL i don't mind putting in a year at a beverage company just to get that 1 year in but after that I want something that pays well that I will enjoy.

 

4mos was all I could stand, 3-5 trailers a day(old POS trailers w/bad landing gear, made my arm numb), every red light was text time for 4wheelers, back and forth on the NJTP(total insanity), but the worst part was commuting back and forth to work(an hour in the morning, sometimes 2-3hrs after a 10-12hr day). I'm way too old for that BS, give me a truck on Sunday nite and I'll bring it back on Saturday morning, 1 or 2wks later.

 

The run I'm on now is 3 twelve hour days starting at 5pm and 3 five hour days starting at 3pm .

 

Is there a difference between the major food services companies and to when/who/how/where they deliver to?
Seems like there are a good deal, I can think of 4 off the top of my head but they all seem very similar.

 

I spent almost a year at US Foods, so I can give an educated guess based on what I've seen and heard over the past year. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong about anything. @Mike2633 probably knows more.

• Sysco and US Foods are very similar in that they both deliver to small customers and big chains with the same trucks, and they usually start early in the morning.
• GFS, Reinhart, and McLane I believe have separate divisions for their big chain customers and the smaller local accounts. I'm pretty sure the chain drivers work overnight and/or 2-day routes.
• Sygma is a division of Sysco that mostly caters to chains. I've seen them at all hours of the day and night.
• PFG has several different companies for different types of customers.

 

You need to have a good back and strong legs to do food service, unless you have a swamper(learned a new term,couldn't wait to use it,lol). And after 20yrs of humping, you might need new ones.

 

GFS and Reinhardt are very similar in size and scope both companies are about the same size and I think equipment wise GFS has the edge over Reinhardt the trucks and trailers at GFS are nicer then Reinhardts, but for the most part both companies are comparable from a sales perspective.

GFS does have a separate board and division for chain account drivers. The real big time name brand places usually go on a chain truck and those routes can be 1, 2 or 3 days depending.

Reinhardt is similar as well. GFS and Reinhardt also service small time "street level" non-chain place accounts as well all throughout the country.

Performance Food Group is more of a collection of companies if you will. Vistar, Kenneth E. Lester (Performance Food Group Customized), Fox River and Performance Food Service.
Vistar is more local then food service what Vistar does is they supply retail confections and pop to malls and movie theaters and hotel gift shops and colleges and other places. Most of there trucks use lift gates there maybe some two wheeling involved, but it's not to the level of what a street level food service driver does.

Kenneth E. Lester was a company PFG bought out same with Fox River and Kenneth E. Lester essentially became Performance Food Group "Customized"

Big time name brand chain places usually are done by a separate chain division (US Foods had one too at one point it time it was called North Star Food Service. I don't know if US Foods is in the chain business any more US is kind of picky about what business they do and what business they don't do.)

Basically how it works is small time and local chains or low volume chain places are put on a regular broadline truck.

Big time corporate owned multistate name brand interstate high volume big time mover chain accounts that have lots of locations and everybody has heard of and advertise on TV are put on a chain division truck.

For instance a sub sandwich places like Jimmy John's.
Submarine sandwhich places are not considered high volume yeah they might be busy at lunch time what ever, but they are not high volume.

The places that do around $400-$500.00 a year square foot wise would be more or less you're chain accounts most chain restaurants are 4500+ square foot and do about 2.5-3million a year in sales. Those accounts are high volume and move a lot of cases. Those are the ones that have a lot of requirements and proprietary products and stuff and because of that they require customized service hence chain restaurant service divisions. The food companies realized that the big name brand places had to be dealt with differently then the small time places.

The places that do 100-400 cases an order every other day places like Longhorn Steak House, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, Corrabas and Red Lobster those are all considered chain accounts, high volume movers that have interstate operations that require a delivery every other day.

Usually with those places there products all come into a warehouse and then the routes are dispatched from the warehouse and the warehouse might do every location with in 5-6 hour drive radius. Which is why a lot of these chain places use sleeper teams. Say there's 30 Red Lobsters in region and each one goes for 6000lbs a delivery. That's 180,000lbs assuming they are all on the same delivery schedule M-W-F it would take 6 trucks just to do the 30 Red Lobsters.




Most warehouses do more then one chain restaurant and most major chains own more then one concept so there may also be (30) Steak House concept restaurants in the region that also average about 6,000lbs a delivery and there schedule maybe T-Th-SA, but truck wise you may only have 3 trucks back out of 6 so essentially you would need another 3 trucks for that chain. So now the DC is up to 9 trucks and probably 12-13 drivers.

The one day routes and the guys who can make it out and back in one day and are close to the DC they are going to usually put those guys in a day cab.


The sleeper cab stuff are the guys who go way out.

That gives the company (2) logs on that route they can turn the route quicker and instead of taking an extra day to get back to the warehouse the turn around time is a little quicker so they can get that truck loaded and out again instead of having it tied up for a day empty trying to make it's way back.

There's probably another restaurant concept that the warehouse also does and that place might also have 30 or so locations in the area on a M-W-Fri and even SA schedule so that adds another 6-trucks or routes so now that's 15 chain trucks running out of a warehouse.

Now with street level stuff and mom and pop small timers it's a little different. The stops are smaller the volume is smaller the margin per-case might be a bit higher because the suppliers have more control over pricing. With chain stuff the food service company basically acts as a glorified cold storage warehouse.



The broadline stuff that does not do the major chain restaurants, those guys are home everyday and do between 500-1000 cases a day. Yesterday I had 954 cases and the load weight was almost 20,958lbs.


Those trucks usually either run out of a warehouse or a drop yard. A place might have (1) or (2) warehouses in a region and there may very well be a major city or geographical area in the region that's 2-hours or so away from the warehouse.

Well say there's a town that the company has about 1000 stops a week in that is about 2 hours from the warehouse. What the company does is they will establish a drop lot in that town and a sales office and there will be a local management squadron and 1000 stops a week is about 16 routes a day.

So what they do is they run doubles at night time.

The trucks go out and leave the yard early in the morning between 1 and 5am and come back between 11am and 3pm.

By 4-5pm the shuttle drivers are coming in and they are taking the empty trailers or back haul trailers back to the warehouse and over night they move trailers from the lots to the warehouses.





Usually shuttle guys go from there yard to the warehouse to another yard back to the warehouse and back to there yard.

There are some chain operations that have drop lots. Say there happens to be a high concentration of stops in an area and the warehouse can't find drivers to run out of the warehouse they usually will establish a drop lot in the area where the stops are and then just shuttle trailers and equipment.

So that's in a nut shell how it works.

 

Here watch this video from Food Pro.
It sums it all up it's about the best one out there.