How Athletic Brewing Beat Spot Rates by 7% With ShipperGuide RFPs

Athletic Brewing’s growth outpaced a quoting process run on email and spreadsheets. With ShipperGuide, the non-alcoholic craft brewer moved to regular RFPs and data-backed broker reviews. By late 2024, it was buying freight about 7% to 8% below average spot rates.

By the Numbers

At a Glance

Athletic Brewing Company started in 2017 in Stratford, Connecticut, brewing non-alcoholic beer with a focus on health and fitness. By late 2024, it was shipping to all 50 states, Canada, the UK, and Europe. Keeping up with that growth meant changing how its logistics team bought freight. That’s where ShipperGuide came in.

Challenge: Quoting by Email Couldn’t Keep Up With Growth

As demand grew, Athletic’s freight buying was still done by hand. The team emailed brokers for quotes on each shipment, compared the replies, and logged the results in spreadsheets. To check how well it was buying, the team looked up the average spot rate when it booked each load and recorded that in a sheet too. Without real-time analytics, savings were hard to identify.

“Logistics operations were very, very manual,” said Keenan Kubicki, director of warehouse and logistics at Athletic Brewing. “There was a lot of back and forth with emails to request quotes, sending three quotes for every single shipment to different brokers, and then weighing out the best options.”

Logistics operations were very, very manual. There was a lot of back and forth with emails.

 Athletic’s network of brokers and carriers was also small, which made it harder to scale and meet demand. As volume grew, the team wanted to move some freight off the spot market and onto contracted lanes. But managing multiple. contracts by hand would have taken more time that the team didn’t have.

Solution: 1 TMS for Every Load and Bid

Athletic’s logistics team looked at several TMS options before choosing ShipperGuide. What decided it was the mix of technology and people ready to support Athletic’s growth, plus the ability to keep control over its own shipments.

Day to day, that meant getting out of email. Shipment details, broker instructions, and bids now live in ShipperGuide, so the team can compare offers side by side instead of piecing them together from an inbox. It also gave Athletic a way to manage RFPs and contract rates without adding to the team’s workload.

“ShipperGuide has really improved our ability to manage every load from beginning to end in a very organized and efficient way,” said Carlos Higuera, international and domestic operations specialist at Athletic Brewing. “We’re now able to provide all the shipment details and instructions to our brokers in one spot without the need for overwhelming email chains.”

Strategy: Quarterly Bids, Rate Benchmarks, and Broker Scorecards

Move beyond spot with a quarterly RFP cycle. Athletic now runs its RFPs through ShipperGuide every quarter, handling multiple bids in one place and selecting the most competitive rates. Along the way, it grew its network of carriers and brokers to 30 providers without adding effort.

Set benchmark before bids come in. In each RFP, Athletic sets benchmarks for the rates it wants to see from its partners, and it makes a point of using ShipperGuide’s counter-offer tool. With every bid in a single view, the team can easily choose the lowest-cost provider at the service level it needs.

Show brokers how they compare. Athletic gives each of its brokers a performance review built from ShipperGuide analytics, with indexed benchmarks of that broker’s rates against other brokers, plus KPIs. These reviews have helped Athletic secure better rates and service from its brokers.

Bring on-time data to service conversations. After its success with ShipperGuide, Athletic added Loadsmart’s Opendock for dock scheduling. It now tracks which carriers arrived on time for their appointments and shares that feedback with them. “Opendock has set good boundaries for our brokers and carriers to work within, which has greatly improved efficiencies across the board,” Kubicki said.

Result: 7% Below Spot Rates, With Room to Scale

When it began running RFPs in ShipperGuide, Athletic was already buying about 4% to 5% below average spot rates, thanks to strong broker relationships. By late 2024, it was operating at about 7% to 8% below spot, the same benchmark it once tracked by hand in a spreadsheet.

“There are tons of opportunities out there to save a lot of money,” Kubicki said. “ShipperGuide can help with that.”

There are tons of opportunities out there to save a lot of money. ShipperGuide can help with that.