Managing logistics operations in-house is often the easiest way to ensure that your supply chain feels like an extension of your brand. But that level of control and quality is hard to sustain as a company expands: More volume means more complexity, and many growing companies find themselves looking for alternative, cost-effective solutions to manage that growth.
That’s exactly the position leaders at Pacific Cheese found themselves in recently. By 2025, the family-owned natural cheese company had seen its footprint expand from California to an international network of suppliers and customers, including three domestic production facilities. The company supplies cheese products for major retail brands as well as some of the country’s largest fast-food chains.
Company leaders needed a better way to manage their supply chain as they scaled operations—so they turned to third-party logistics services provider (3PL) ITS Logistics for help.
“When you’re small, you can build it yourself. When you’re really large, you can buy a TMS [transportation management system], hire analysts, and pay for market intelligence,” Brandon Smith, vice president of operations at Pacific Cheese, said in a case study describing the companies’ partnership. “Pacific Cheese was caught in the middle of these two extremes. We’d grown too large and complex to self-manage in a cost-efficient way, but not large enough to justify the cost of all the people and tech to keep doing it in house. With ITS, we get all the benefits but only pay for what we use in technology, management, and thought leadership.”
Today, Pacific Cheese utilizes a fully managed logistics solution from ITS.
SOPHISTICATION AT SCALE
ITS crafted a solution that gives Pacific Cheese “enterprise-level sophistication at scale,” leaders from both companies explain. The program includes a dedicated managed transportation team, implementation of a customized transportation management system (TMS), and a fully managed RFP (request for proposal) process that expanded Pacific Cheese’s carrier network while optimizing network utilization and enhancing its fraud prevention capabilities.
“Mid-market shippers have to work much harder to be cost-efficient than enterprises do, especially when it comes to logistics,” Jameson Goforth, vice president of final mile and managed solutions at ITS Logistics, said in the case study. “Our goal for Pacific Cheese was to help it adopt a technical, strategic, and operational approach that ensures it’s ready to meet the challenges of rising costs and market uncertainty, changing the mindset from: How do we move this load today? to How can we increase the efficiency of our supply chain?”
RESULTS THAT MEASURE UP
Since partnering with ITS, Pacific Cheese has achieved measurable improvements across its supply chain operations, including:
- A 13% overall transportation cost reduction with month-over-month savings growth;
- 19% lane-specific savings achieved by redesigning routes for optimal utilization;
- A 20% reduction in LTL (less-than-truckload) spend through improved network efficiency and consolidation;
- The ability to pass cost savings along to customers—either directly or by way of finished-goods pricing;
- Increased visibility and communication via integrated TMS and real-time shipment tracking;
- An enhanced carrier procurement process and access to industry-leading carrier vetting technology from tech providers like GenLogs, DAT, and Highway.
“We embarked on a pretty ambitious path together—ITS integrating new elements of its service line and Pacific Cheese entrusting its logistics operations to a managed service provider after 50 years of managing them ourselves,” Smith said in the case study. “My team has a very high bar for compliments, and they continually highlight how responsive, action-oriented, and accountable ITS is. They’ve become an integral part of our team.”
