The short answer
Packaging is light, bulky, and low in value per cubic foot, so the cost to move it is high relative to what it sells for. When freight is assumed to be built into price, nobody checks whether it still is after fuel, carrier rates, and order patterns change. Match carrier and fleet costs to invoices by customer, lane, and order size, and divide what was billed for delivery by what it cost. The gap is usually largest on small, frequent orders and long lanes.
Where it hides in packaging distribution
Cube, not weight
Free delivery thresholds set years ago
Drop-ships from manufacturers
Long lanes priced like short ones
The records to pull
Twelve to twenty-four months of each. Nothing needs to be installed or connected; a spreadsheet export is enough.
Carrier invoices and fleet costs
Invoice lines
Freight policy
The ten-day test
Days 1–2
Days 3–5
Days 6–8
Days 9–10
Specimen · illustrative figures
A $55M packaging distributor paid $3.9M to move goods and billed $2.2M, a 56 percent recovery rate. Drop-ships with unbilled manufacturer freight accounted for $310K. Orders under $400 carried 29 percent of freight cost. Passing through drop-ship freight and moving to a cube-based charge on small orders was worth an estimated $600K to $850K a year.
Stop condition, written first
Stop if recovery is above 90 percent overall and within ten points across lanes and order sizes, in both the search period and the holdout.
What gets built if it holds
A delivery charge calculated from cube and lane at quote time, plus an automatic pass-through of manufacturer freight on drop-ships. It runs inside your operation, belongs to you, and is measured weekly against the dollar range the test produced.
Sources
- 16National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, “The Growing Impact of Freight Recovery,” Intelligent Sales and Profit Acceleration series, 2021, updated August 2026.
Specimen figures are illustrative and do not describe a Modven client. Reviewed October 10, 2026.