Winterizing Your Supply Chain

How Much Harder is it to Transport Goods in the Winter?

Did you know it’s not just your pool or lake house that have to be prepped for winter?? Supply chains have to be winterized too. Seventy percent of Americans live in winter states and just about everything they need travels its last leg of the journey by road; many of which are icy and windswept from November to April.? Unless alerted to severe weather, consumers rarely pause to consider how road conditions five hundred miles away might affect what they see on their grocery shelves and yet, what happens at one point on a supply chain affects the whole chain.

Snow, freezing temperatures, ice and winter winds are responsible for stranded trucks.? An estimated 12% of truck delays are due to weather related issues along wintery shipping hubs. And even when trucks are able to make the trip, snow can make it hard for warehouse personnel to get to work. Shipments are left unloaded and drivers are immobilized if they have to wait to be reloaded.

While those may be obvious implications of freight transport during the winter season, over the road truckers and their shipping companies contend with a few obstacles you may not have considered.

Hours of Service Regulations

You’re probably familiar with hours-of-service regulations that require drivers to log their road time and take strategic breaks, but did you know that there are also regulations pertaining to daylight hours.? Those heavy loads you see traveling down the highway have a curfew and the sun dictates when it’s time to shut down operations for the day. During the summer when daylight hours are longer, drivers can haul big equipment, oversized loads and heavy freight for the normal twelve hour shift as the light allows for it. In the winter, those hours shorten as much as three hours.

Shipping companies that painstakingly map routes, watch weather conditions and work to eliminate costly delay factors winterize their supply chains by also calculating daylight hours. A trip that takes two days from Baltimore, Maryland to Lincoln, Nebraska in the summer might take 4 days during the winter months primarily because driving hours are shortened.

Fuel Blends Change

Maybe you’ve also heard that fuel blends?change as the weather changes. As temperatures rise, refineries mix blends of fuel with less vaporization. When temperatures start to fall, refineries shift their blends to ensure fuel gelling does not occur.? Those fuel additives keep trucks running all winter, but the blends are less efficient and trucks need to fill up more often. It might not seem like a big deal to those of us who fill up a gas tank once a week, but for shipping companies paying for billions of dollars of fuel every year, the pennies on the dollar can start to add up to big bills.?

On average 544 million driving hours are lost every year due to winter road closures and highway standstills. Drivers stranded at truck stops or slowly inching their way along frozen roads end up costing a shipping company millions of dollars in fuel, wages and warehouse storage fees needed to accommodate delays.

Trucks Are the Backbone of Supply Chains

Virtually all of our goods are transported by truck at some point along their supply chain which makes trucks and their drivers the very backbone of industry. For just in time deliveries of goods like pharmaceuticals, produce and industrial supplies winter weather can halt the flow of time sensitive transport. If products expire past their shelf life, the loss is costly.?

Delayed shipments of food produce an average of 2.4 million pounds of waste every year. That is the equivalent of 2 million meals and 20,000 gallons of fuel; an average loss of $6 million for large food companies. Delays hurt both the shipping company and consumers as shippers point to shipping costs being the number one reason they raise prices. Too many road closures in one winter and a shipping company begins to lose profit.

As we’ve just had record snowfall across stretches of road that make up our nation’s freight hub, it might be worth remembering that the groceries you put in your cart got there because a truck driver stopped to chain up all eighteen wheels on a mountain pass, a Midwest warehouse worker shoveled their car out to get to work so they could fill a truck with your food, and somewhere in a fuel refinery people are working to make sure you have what you need to keep your house warm and transport trucks running.

Originally Posted on Stratagerm's Blog on January 24, 2025.