IN THE NEWS: The Food and Beverage Industry is Driven by E-Commerce Growth | Running on Ice

FreightWaves TV
August 29, 2025
Mary O'Connell

FROM THE INTERVIEW:

Host Mary O'Connell: "Today, we welcome Kasia Wenker, Vice President of Solutions Engineering at ITS Logistics. Lately, the only thing we've heard about it is that it's one of the top targets for cargo theft. But what else is going on in the food and beverage space?"

Kasia Wenker: "The food and beverage supply chain is one of the most critical and complex sectors of logistics and one of the most fragmented in the world. On the one hand, you have companies like Amazon Fresh delivering groceries to 1,000 cities today, same day. We have Walmart Plus; you can get deliveries in under an hour. They have dark stores for deliveries only. These companies are making a service a differentiator. So it's no longer what brand of pasta you're going to order. How fast can you get this delivered to your door for dinner tonight? Everybody has essentially the same product and roughly the same cost. So it's really about your service."

Mary: "You hit the really interesting point, which is: on the grocery food and beverage level, it's like everybody has essentially the same product at roughly the same cost. If I can choose any of the products, I'm going to want the one that either gets to me the fastest or gets to me in the most convenient timeframe.

Kasia: "100%. 10 years ago, e-commerce grocery shopping was a niche. Today? 50% of households in the US are buying groceries online regularly. It's part of their daily life. But what does this mean for logistics? It means smaller orders, more frequent deliveries, and much smaller and more frequent replenishment. There's a next frontier that has a lot to do with predictive analytics. And you have household-level demand data. Think about your fridge and your pantry becoming nodes in the supply chain."

....

Mary: "You guys (at ITS Logistics) just built these huge national food and beverage hubs. What fueled the development of these hubs?"

Kasia: "We're at the inflection point. You're not really looking for space, but you're looking for a technology hub with automation, that has the technology, and last-mile delivery. You're looking for a hub that will integrate with autonomous delivery, dark store delivery, a micro-fulfillment hub, and those hubs need to be able to flex with demand and integrate the product upstream. So we built these hubs in order to flex with demand."

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