The company commemorated the milestone at a special ceremony February 1.

Steve Russell, founder and CEO of Celadon Group, took delivery of a special award to commemorate his fleet’s receipt of the 100,000th trailer. Other speakers included the mayor of Terre Haute and several members of the Great Dane management team. The ceremony also recognized the 14 Great Dane employees who have worked in the Terre Haute plant since it opened 17 years ago.

Great Dane opened the 565,000-sq-ft facility in 1995 with a single production line and added a second line two months after the plant opened. It produced 2,700 trailers during its first year of operation. It has averaged more than 8,200 trailers per year in the 17 years it has been in operation.

The plant is capable of producing the full line of Great Dane’s new Champion dry van series, including the Champion CP dry-freight van that utilizes the company’s composite panel technology.

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Osterberg told the audience that he had four “keys to success” when it comes to fleet safety: Hire the “right” drivers (and retain them); train them effectively; manage driver-performance actively, and leverage technology to enhance safety programs.

Traditional safety metrics are lagging, not leading indicators, he noted. Rather, he said Effectiveness flows from the ability to identify and proactively manage those leading indicators, and technology can definitely help to get the job done.

“Technology enables visibility to driver behavior,” Osterberg said. “In the past, it was a crash that raised our awareness of an aggressive driver. Now we can [use driver performance monitoring technology to help us] detect indicators of problematic behavior to enable interventions to remediate the behavior preemptively.”

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For a complete solution, customers can choose the Kenworth NavPlus system. For those that don’t want all the bells and whistles of the NavPlus, factory-installed radios are now Bluetooth capable, Kenworth said.

“While Kenworth NavPlus is the ultimate do-all, hands-free cell phone system married to true-truck navigation, iPod and MP3 integration, diagnostics, gauges and a host of other features, some drivers just want basic Bluetooth capability, and that’s what we now offer with our two high-quality radios,” said Michelle Harry, Kenworth’s special projects marketing manager.

The factory-installed AM/FM/CD radios are available with or without satellite radio capability. A small Bluetooth microphone is mounted in the A-pillar trim above the driver. Up to eight cell phones can be synchronized to the radios and contacts can be automatically loaded, the company said. A contact screen makes calling easy while parked, but drivers can also take advantage of voice command mode to make calls while on the move.

When incoming calls are received, the radio displays the name of the caller and phone number. Pushing the OK button accepts the call, while the ESC button rejects the call.

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According to year-end numbers released by the Environmental Protection Agency, the total volume of nearly 1.1 billion gallons is a record for the industry. The number exceeded the 800-million-gallon target required by the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard. The previous record for biodiesel production was about 690 million gallons in 2008.

The industry’s success in 2011 comes after Congress reinstated the fuel’s $1-per-gallon tax credit in December 2010 and as the EPA’s RFS program for biodiesel completed its first full year. Without those policies in place in 2010, production dropped dramatically as dozens of plants shuttered and thousands of people lost jobs.

The tax incentive expired on Dec. 31, 2011, and the biodiesel industry is urging Congress to reinstate it. In addition, the industry is calling on the EPA and the Obama administration to finalize the EPA’s proposal to boost the biodiesel volume requirement under the RFS to 1.28 billion gallons in 2013.

“Our success clearly demonstrates that the biodiesel tax incentive and the Renewable Fuel Standard are working just as Congress envisioned,” says Anne Steckel, vice president of federal affairs for the National Biodiesel Board. “Our industry is creating jobs, reducing our dependence on imported fuel, and improving the environment.”

A recent economic study commissioned by NBB found that biodiesel production of 1 billion gallons supports 39,027 jobs across the country and more than $2.1 billion in household income. An additional 11,698 jobs could be added between 2012 and 2013 alone under continued growth in the RFS and with an extension of the biodiesel tax incentive.

“Now is not the time to be second-guessing the RFS or eliminating the biodiesel tax incentive,” Steckel says. “We’re proving that the policies work, that American innovation and competitiveness can pull us away from our dangerous dependence on imported fuel. Just as President Obama said in his State of the Union this week, we need to stay the course to continue creating jobs and building America’s energy capacity.”

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Section 111 of the new law, for instance, requires the Health and Human Services secretary to “promulgate regulations onsanitary transportation practices for the transportationof food,” and also requires theFDA (Food and Drug Administration) “to conduct a study on the transportation of food, including the unique needs of rural and frontier areas.”

Section 204 requires the Health and Human Services secretary to “improve tracking and tracing of processed foods and fruits and vegetables that are raw agricultural commodities in the event of a food-borne illness outbreak; and establish standards for the type of information, format, and time frame for persons to submit records to aid the secretary in such tracking and tracing.”

The Food Safety Modernization Act is, by no means, the first and only move to help assure that food remains safe to eat from farm to the fork. Shippers of some cargo, like perishable food and pharmaceuticals, have been asking fleets to step up and assume additional responsibility for the integrity and safety of their cargo for some time.

They are and have been requiring carriers to deploy technology to help assure the integrity and safety of their goods and, in the case of temperature-controlled food for instance, also help to reduce spoilage and loss. The shippers’ customers’ in this case are the ones holding the whip handle, according to Dr. John Ryan, president of Ryan Systems. Ryan has spent over 25 years implementing high-technology quality control systems and is credited with piloting the first farm-to-fork, Internet-enabled food traceability system using sensors and RFID technology to help get the job done.

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The Annual Energy Outlook 2012 Reference case released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration features updated projections for U.S. energy markets through 2035.

“Our updated reference case projections show natural gas and renewables gaining an increasing share of U.S. electric power generation, domestic crude oil and natural gas production growing, reliance on imported oil decreasing, U.S. natural gas production exceeding consumption, and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions remaining below their 2005 level through 2035,” said EIA Acting Administrator Howard Gruenspecht.

These projections, he said, reflect increased energy efficiency, updated assessments of energy technologies and domestic energy resources, the influence of evolving consumer preferences, and projected slow economic growth.

Domestic crude oil production is expected to grow by more than 20% over the coming decade. Domestic crude production increased from 5.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 5.5 million barrels per day in 2010. Over the next 10 years, continued development of tight oil combined with the development of offshore Gulf of Mexico resources are projected to push domestic crude oil production to 6.7 million barrels per day in 2020, a level not seen since 1994.

U.S. dependence on imported petroleum liquids declines in the EIA’s projections, primarily as a result of growth in domestic oil production of over 1 million barrels per day by 2020, an increase in biofuel use of over 1 million barrels per day crude oil equivalent by 2024, and modest growth in transportation sector demand through 2035. Net petroleum imports as a share of total U.S. liquid fuels consumed drop from 49% in 2010 to 38% in 2020 and 36% in 2035, according to the EIA’s projections.

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The firm also believes that the vertical integration trends among global truck manufacturers may lead to more intricate partnerships with lubricant makers, fostering the creation of “private label” engine oils, transmission fluids, etc., which could ultimately result in tighter OEM engine oil specifications to maintain warranty coverage.

In an interview with Fleet Owner, Sandeep Kar and Wallace Lau – respectively the global director of commercial vehicle research and truck research analyst for Frost & Sullivan – explained engine oils change to much lower viscosity formulations over the next six years to boost engine efficiency and thus fuel economy.

Research by both Kar and Lau indicate that 5W-40 and 5W-30 – even so-called “zero weight” oil blends of 0W-20 and 0W-30 – are being developed for medium- and heavy-duty truck engines in an attempt to generate the fuel savings necessary to meet federal fuel economy rules. However, Lau stressed that the challenge for such “low” and “no weight” oils will be maintaining engine protection properties as well as temperature handling characteristics.

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The company, which was founded in 2007, converts sunlight and waste CO2 to infrastructure-ready diesel, ethanol or commodity chemicals with no dependence on biomass feedstocks, downstream processing or precious natural resources. Though many biofuels companies have tried making cellulosic ethanol from non-food sources, none have succeeded at a commercial scale.

With this recent funding, which brings funding to $110 million to date, Joule plans to expand and operate a demonstration plant in Hobbs, N.M., to test its process at a much larger scale. The facility has the potential to grow to 1,000 acres for commercial production.

“Our goal since inception has been to enable large-scale, renewable fuel production at unprecedented costs and volumes in the near term, without the obstacles and slow pace of biofuel progress,” says president and CEO William J. Sims. “On the heels of our latest funding round and technology advancement, we’re in a very strong position to make it happen as planned.”

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In many ways, while technology is evident everywhere in the business world, accurately defining a ‘technology’ company has in many ways become more difficult, now that most companies provide various technology-based products and services in addition to their core offerings. For instance, it’s expected that transportation providers, aside from physically moving a shipment from point A to B, will provide shippers with the ability to track their shipments online at the very least, while many have even developed their own robust software products and services that are branded and marketed individually.

Our eighth annual FL100 list of leading software and technology companies reflects this trend and how it’s unfolding in the food and beverage industry. This year’s compilation includes well-known, pure-play technology companies such as Oracle and SAP, along with younger companies like Intelleflex and GT Nexus, who are joining a new generation of providers whose technology advancements in areas like RFID and cloud computing, respectively, are not only exciting but are making it possible to meet the challenges associated with tracking, tracing, and compliance that are imperative for today’s food supply chains.

So, while defining a technology company may not be as clear-cut as it used to be, one thing is clear: technology is a competitive differentiator in our industry, whether you’re a food shipper or transportation provider.

M.J. Kellner Foodservice would agree. They are the recipient of this year’s Golden Pallet Award for small distributors. Their willingness to tackle a business challenge head-on by building a new facility complete with state of the art software and technology (WMS, voice picking, etc.) has yielded a healthy return on their investment, some of which the company itself wasn’t even expecting. Check out their success story on page 34.

Technology is also a predominant theme in our feature on maintaining cold chain integrity.

For example, Great Dane Trailers is making it possible for shippers to get more life out of their reefer containers with their ThermoGuard product. The technology focuses on improving the efficacy of the interior liner, which degrades over time, thereby making the reefer more expensive to operate. Specifically, ThermoGuard reefers can potentially reduce cooling unit run time by more than 1,000 hours over a five-year period.

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“Being an industry leader has been central to Cox’s business strategy since its inception over 30 years ago,” said Jay Smith, president of Cox Transportation Services. “The decision to retrofit our fleet with Solus aerodynamic skirts was driven by our desire to be fuel efficient and increase profitability.”

The Solus split skirt can provide a 5% fuel economy improvement, the company said. It includes a two-piece design with 8 in. of static ground clearance and the rugged flex skirt panels offer 20 in. of total ground clearance. The panels weigh less than 200 lbs.

“This investment gives Cox a significant competitive advantage, making it one of the most fuel efficient and technologically advanced fleets on the East Coast. As the trucking industry continues to evolve and opportunities arise, it is the hard working and forward thinking companies like Cox that will be positioned to thrive,” said Richard Wood, president of Solus.

Cox is also evaluating Solus’ wheel cavity cover, which can add an additional 1.3% fuel economy improvement, Solus said.

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