Transportation/ Delivery

Martin-Brower, a food distributer for McDonald’s, faced escalating transportation costs and decided to make a change. They were shipping all of McDonald’s products via truck, but that was becoming inefficient. Shipping by rail seemed to be a good option.

Railway shipping cut costs and eliminated the congestion that happened at company docks. Cryo-Trans, a logistics and transportation provider, partnered with Martin-Brower in order to transport. The difficulty with transporting McDonald’s goods, is that they need to stay frozen. Luckily, Cryo-Trans builds and leases mechanically refrigerated rail cars. The downfall is that it takes rail cars more time to transport than the trucks did. They did some rerouting in order to decrease some of the time taken to transport. They also pack the rail cars as full as possible so that they can transport a lot of product.

GPS units help them to constantly monitor the rail cars and know if anything is causing their transport to delay. They can see their route and also see if anything happens to the car causing it to slow down their shipment. They can modify the problems that occur and their rail car can again be on it’s way.

This distributer is only one of many for McDonald’s, so not all of them use this method of transportation. The other’s transport via truck. In future years, we could definitely see a shift towards railway transportation in order to reduce costs.

Rail cars have a better environmental impact than trucks do. Rail cars are more energy efficient and fuel is less carbon intensive. This makes rail cars a more efficient option.