The freight market has already turned. The only question now: who will still get trucks when capacity tightens — and who won’t.
The freight market has turned. Carriers are already prioritizing which shippers get covered — and the sorting is based on how you’ve treated them for the last three years. Here’s what that means, and what to do about it now.
For three years, food manufacturers have operated in one of the most forgiving freight markets in recent memory. The post-pandemic capacity surge — which pushed dry van spot rates above $3.00 per mile at its 2022 peak — collapsed into a freight recession that extended far longer than most industry forecasters predicted. Rates bottomed near $2.10 per mile. Carrier capacity was abundant. Trucks were available. Shippers held the leverage, and most of them used it.
That era is ending. The evidence is in the data, and it is accumulating quickly.
The SONAR Outbound Tender Rejection Index — the most widely watched real-time signal of capacity tightness — tells the story precisely. Before Thanksgiving 2025, the OTRI sat below 6%. By mid-December it had climbed above 10%, a level not seen in over a year. It peaked near 13% during the holiday period — well above the 7–8% threshold that historically marks the beginning of a sustained upturn in spot rates. As of early 2026, rejection rates are holding in the 12–13% range, with the Logistics Managers Index reporting its highest transportation utilization reading since May 2022.
Spot rates have responded in kind. The national average dry van spot rate entering 2026 is approximately $2.50–$2.60 per mile, up roughly 8% year over year. The Cass Truckload Linehaul Index returned to year-over-year growth in late 2025. C.H. Robinson revised its 2026 truckload spot rate forecast upward to approximately 8% year-over-year growth.
The capacity side is equally clear. Roughly 80,000–90,000 trucking authorities were revoked or voluntarily surrendered during the 2023–2024 downturn. FMCSA regulatory enforcement has accelerated carrier attrition further, with crackdowns on English-language proficiency requirements and non-domiciled CDL holders expected to remove an additional 10–15% of available capacity. The coiled spring that FreightWaves described in late 2025 — a market wound tight by years of capacity attrition — is releasing.
Tender rejection rates have more than doubled since Thanksgiving. Spot rates are climbing. Carrier authorities are being revoked at scale. The freight recession is over. The question now is not whether the market is turning — it is whether your carrier relationships are ready for what comes next.
For food manufacturers who spent the last three years assuming trucks would always be available at favorable rates, the window to build Preferred Shipper status is closing. It is not closed yet. But it is closing.
What made the 2023–2025 freight recession unusual was not its depth — the industry has seen comparable rate compression before. What made it unusual was what it concealed. While spot rates were low and capacity was loose, the structural conditions that drive long-term tightening were quietly worsening beneath the surface.
The driver shortage has proven more persistent and more complex than a simple head count. The ATA’s chief economist noted at their 2024 conference that while the shortage had eased numerically, it had done so for all the wrong reasons — demand fell, drivers didn’t return, and the quality of available drivers has become the more pressing constraint. The industry now needs to hire 1.2 million new drivers over the next decade just to replace retirees and keep pace with demand. The average age of a commercial truck driver is 47. That retirement cliff is not receding.
Meanwhile, the carrier base has been permanently restructured. An estimated 50,000 or more carrier authorities were cancelled in 2023 and 2024 alone. The small and mid-sized carriers who make up 91% of the industry bore the brunt of the freight recession, and many did not survive it.
The freight recession didn’t reset the market back to normal. It destroyed capacity that won’t come back — and the tightening happening now is happening on top of a structurally depleted carrier base.
In a soft market, carrier behavior is quiet. In a tightening market, the sorting of shippers into preferred and non-preferred tiers becomes visible: rejection rates climb, spot exposure increases for lower-priority shippers, and capacity flows toward relationships rather than spot awards.
That sorting is happening right now. Routing guides that held firm through three years of excess capacity are beginning to slip. For shippers who have been relying on the soft market to mask the absence of genuine carrier relationships, the next six to twelve months will be clarifying.
The carriers making these decisions are operating in a margin-compressed environment that has only recently begun to improve. Operational costs rose 6% from 2023 to 2024, with insurance premiums posting double-digit increases. The carriers who survived the freight recession did so by managing their networks tightly — and the shippers who made that management easier are the ones whose loads get covered when the routing guide fails.
Diesel prices surged more than 96 cents per gallon in a single week during early March 2026 — the largest one-week increase ever recorded — driven by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz following U.S.-Israel military conflict with Iran. Brent crude spiked above $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022.
The national average for on-highway diesel hit $4.86 per gallon the week of March 9, 2026, up from $3.52 just weeks prior — a jump of more than 30% in under a month.
Fuel is approximately 21% of total cost per mile for the average carrier, according to ATRI benchmarking. For smaller owner-operators, it can reach 30–40% of total operating costs. FTR Transportation Intelligence has warned that the Shippers Conditions Index could fall below its previous record low, describing current conditions as potentially the toughest overall for shippers on record.
For food manufacturers, whose refrigerated freight is doubly dependent on diesel — for both power unit and reefer operation — the fuel spike is not a line-item problem. It is a supply chain exposure.
The single most controllable factor in a food manufacturer’s carrier relationships — and one of the most neglected — is detention. ATRI’s 2024 research found that the trucking industry loses $15.1 billion annually to detention, with individual drivers losing $11,000 to $19,000 per year to uncompensated wait time. Drivers are detained during 39.3% of all deliveries — and ATRI noted explicitly that detention is particularly rampant in the food services industry.
In a soft market, carriers absorb detention because they have no better option. In a tightening market, they do not. ATRI research shows that a large majority of carriers actively avoid facilities with chronic detention problems. The ELD mandate means every hour a driver spends at a shipper’s dock is permanently recorded — and carriers can see exactly which facilities burn their drivers’ hours.
In a tightening market, detention is no longer an inconvenience — it is a disqualifier.
Food manufacturers entering a tightening market with poor dwell-time records are not entering it with a clean slate. They are entering it with a documented history that carriers have been watching and will act on.
Preferred Shipper status is not a program or a certification. It is a reputation — built through consistent operational behavior that signals to carriers and drivers that your freight is worth hauling. It breaks into three dimensions that carriers evaluate, consciously or not, every time they decide whose load to take.
The first question a carrier asks about any shipper relationship is whether it will be profitable and predictable. Shippers who offer consistent volume, fair rates, and prompt payment become structurally more valuable in a rising market.
Drivers talk. In an industry where annual turnover exceeds 90% at many large carriers, the facilities that drivers want to return to — and the ones they actively avoid — are known throughout the carrier network faster than any formal rating system could capture.
The third dimension is what converts a transactional carrier arrangement into a strategic one — the kind that protects capacity in the tightening market now unfolding.
The Logistics Managers Index’s February 2026 transportation reading — its highest since May 2022 — signals that the tightening is not a seasonal blip. Routing guides are slipping. Spot rates are climbing. Tender rejections are holding at levels that historically precede a full cycle turn. The manufacturers who emerge from this cycle in the best position are acting now.
C.H. Robinson’s 2026 forecast calls for the primary rate increases to concentrate in the second half of the year. The window to contract at rates that still reflect a recovering rather than a fully tightened market is the first half of 2026.
ELD data from your carrier partners shows exactly how long trucks are spending at your facilities. If your average dwell exceeds two hours, you have a documented problem that is already costing you in rate premiums — and that will cost you in coverage as the market tightens.
The March 2026 diesel spike is the fastest and largest on record. If your carrier contracts do not include indexed fuel surcharge tables tied to the DOE weekly average, you are negotiating fuel cost every time the market moves. Food manufacturers who proactively align on fuel recovery will be treated as preferred partners.
Driver-friendly amenities are inexpensive relative to the freight cost premiums that accumulate from poor driver satisfaction. The facilities that drivers seek out are being determined by the experiences they are having right now.
Route guide failures are already increasing. Shippers with shallow routing guides — one or two carriers per lane — are significantly more exposed. Building depth now, while carriers are still competing for contracts, is materially easier than doing it after the market has fully turned.
Carriers in a tightening market have options they didn’t have six months ago. Shippers who held every piece of leverage through the freight recession — squeezing rates, disputing routine charges, stretching payment terms — should expect those behaviors to be remembered when the leverage shifts.
In 2016, when this article was first written, the argument for Preferred Shipper status was a warning about a tightening that hadn’t yet fully arrived. In 2026, it is a description of a tightening that is already underway.
The shift is now visible in every metric that matters. Tender rejection rates have more than doubled in three months. Spot rates are climbing month over month. Carrier authorities are being revoked faster than new ones are being issued. The freight recession burned off excess capacity rather than creating new supply — and the capacity exit caused by the March 2026 diesel spike is happening in parallel.
The food manufacturers who will navigate this transition well are not the ones who are surprised by it. They are the ones who used the soft market to build the relationships, the operational practices, and the shipper reputation that make them the obvious choice when a carrier has one load to cover and three options to cover it.
Preferred Shipper status is earned through consistent, respectful, economically fair behavior — over time, at the facility level, in every interaction with every driver who pulls into the dock. It cannot be purchased when capacity gets tight. It can only be built before it does.
Grandma had it right: treat people the way you want to be treated. That goes for drivers too. The market is telling you, right now, that the time to build it is almost up.
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