Consider this: farm-fresh peaches delivered to your door in just two days, tasty pecans right in time for the holidays—all without a trip to crowded grocery stores.
That’s what you get when you order direct from Pearson Farm.
Based in Georgia, the Pearson family has been tilling the soil for five generations and perfecting their peach and pecan farm for over 135. Now it’s run by a husband and wife team, Lawton and Lanier Pearson.
While their mainstay is selling wholesale to grocery stores around the country, they also run an in-person retail store and a mail-order service to sell directly to their customers. While online sales had seen steady growth, 2020 saw an explosion in e-commerce sales.
That means shipping became a considerable expense. See how we saved them an additional $200,000 on shipping costs—during our second consecutive year of negotiations.
Shipping the Perfect Peach
Pearson Farm sells peaches, pecans and baked goods from their website and ships them all over the country. But shipping peaches can be tricky. After all, the phrase “bruise like a peach” had to come from somewhere.
The peaches can’t touch each other, can’t get too warm, and have to reach their destination in two days. As you can imagine, this presents some unique shipping challenges for the Pearson team—and some costly price implications.
But until a partner introduced them to Reveel, the Pearson team didn’t know contract negotiations were even an option.
“We were at the mercy of UPS,” said Lanier. “We didn’t understand that there’s a whole world of negotiation available out there.”
Sweet Negotiations
Between 2020 and 2021, Pearson Farm doubled the number of peaches they sold directly to their customers. Even though they had just gone through negotiations in 2020, this put them in a good position to reopen the discussion.
Lanier stepped into a more active role in the company in 2020. Her expertise lay in all things peaches and pecans—not shipping. And like many business owners, she had to weigh whether it was a good use of her time to learn the intricacies of the shipping industry or if she should invest in help.
“To me, one of the most overwhelming and technically difficult parts of [the business] was trying to understand the UPS contract,” Lanier said.
Fortunately, another company introduced her to Reveel, and we were able to walk her through the negotiations process in detail.
“As someone who has no expertise and didn’t have anybody on staff who had any expertise in shipping, it was just a tremendous help,” said Lanier.
In addition to the savings they saw in 2020, this second round of negotiations resulted in another $200,000 in discounts. The Reveel team focused on reducing minimums, since most boxes were under ten pounds, and reducing the cost of second-day air, which Pearson Farm relied on to get fresh peaches to their customers around the country.
“Without Reveel, there’s just absolutely no way I could have gained that degree of knowledge in a short time and been able to accomplish that,” said Lanier.
A Fresh Competitive Advantage
Even when you’re the best at delivering fresh peaches to your customers’ doors, it helps to have every advantage you can muster.
“Our goal is to get fresh food to people at a reasonable price,” said Lanier. For Pearson Farm, that means offering free shipping for the customers for the first time in 2020.
Pearson Farm also provides fulfillment services to other businesses, and having lower shipping costs makes them even more appealing for potential partnerships.
Work with Reveel
The way Lanier puts it, she was a blank slate before working with Reveel. Now she has enough information to help her business succeed in the world of shipping, and she has Reveel for the deep industry knowledge needed to thrive.
How does Lanier sum up her Reveel experience? “Working with them was just a piece of cake.”
If you’d like to work with Reveel and save up to 30% on shipping, reach us here.
Or go here to dive into the Shipping Intelligence® Platform for free.
