Refrigerated haulage quotes look interchangeable on paper. The differences show up later, at a goods-in window with a queried load, which is an expensive place to discover them. These twelve questions surface the differences before you commit. We’d expect to answer all twelve ourselves, so this list is also a fair way to test us.
Coverage and capacity
1. Where are your depots, actually? A carrier’s honest next-day map radiates from its buildings. “Nationwide” from a single site means long runs and your freight overnighting somewhere. Ask for depot locations and what each site actually holds; a real answer sounds like ours: four sites, Leeds to Taunton, with frozen, chilled and ambient storage at each.
2. Whose vehicles and whose drivers? Plenty of carriers sell nationwide coverage and deliver it by handing your freight to a subcontractor mid-afternoon. That’s not automatically bad, but you should know whose van your product ends up on and whose training the driver had. Ask directly.
3. What does the fleet range look like? One vehicle size makes every job that size, and you pay for the mismatch. A range of sizes means a single pallet doesn’t ride in an empty artic and a full load doesn’t split across two rigids.
4. Can you carry chilled and frozen together? If your range spans bands, dual-zone capability means one vehicle instead of two. Ask how each zone is monitored and whether the records separate cleanly.
Compliance and evidence
5. Which accreditations, and can I see the certificates? BRCGS certification for storage and distribution is the food industry’s benchmark, and the grade matters: AA is the highest grade in the standard. Ask for current certificates rather than logos on a website, and check the dates, because a certificate expires. (What we hold, and how to request ours.)
6. How is temperature recorded? The dividing line is per-consignment versus per-vehicle. We’ve written a separate checklist on cold-chain evidence because this one question decides most rejection disputes.
7. What happens when a unit deviates in transit? You’re listening for a procedure with names in it, not reassurance.
8. Can your team read a temperature trace? Air temperature is not product temperature. A carrier that can’t explain the difference will lose you a defensible load.
The relationship
9. Who answers the phone at 4pm on a Friday? Cold chains fail at inconvenient times. Ask who you’d actually speak to when a delivery needs changing today, and whether that person can make decisions or only log tickets.
10. What happens when you get it wrong? Every carrier fails sometimes. The good ones tell you before you find out, fix it, and show up with the data. Ask for a real example of a failure and what followed. Evasion here tells you everything.
11. Can I speak to a customer like me? References beat testimonials. A wholesaler should talk to a wholesaler, a manufacturer to a manufacturer. Public reviews help too, provided they’re recent and specific (ours are on Google).
12. Did they scope the job before quoting it? We don’t publish standard rates online because every job is priced to your specific requirement, and we’d be suspicious of any cold-chain quote produced without questions about what you move, how much and where it goes. A quote built without those questions is a quote built on assumptions, and the assumptions become your problem in week three.
Using the list
Send these to two or three carriers, and compare the speed and specificity of the answers as much as their content. The carrier that comes back with numbers and documents inside a day is showing you what being their customer is like. Ask us the lot.
