Shoreland Transport of Saint George, New Brunswick is the in-house carrier for global seafood giant Cook Incorporated. Shoreland began operations in 2002, serving the New England states, including Boston and New York City, as well as Ontario and Quebec.

With the acquisition of Connors Transfer in 2015, the fleet grew to its current complement of 235 trucks and more than 500 trailers, including vans, reefer units, tankers, flat decks, and some specialty equipment.

With many fuel-saving strategies to choose from, Shoreland opted to prioritize driver comfort and convenience. The company built incentive programs to improve driver buy-in and provided the tools to drive compliance.

Rodney Weston: We look at the opportunities when it comes to lowering fuel costs through low idle.

In the early days, we drove the incentive program for our drivers through low-idle programs. And when you offer those programs, you need to be able to give people the tools to do the job. And we certainly did that. We invested early in APUs for our equipment and looked at other options such as idle management systems that are provided by the OEMs. With low idle, APUs have been an effective part of our business, whether it’s using Thermo King’s TriPac or going into the idle management systems with Kenworth — the Kenworth Idle Management System — or ParkSmart with our Freightliner units.

They’re very effective in that manner. They’re able to make sure that the driver doesn’t have to idle the truck, which actually lowers our maintenance costs, because we all know that the more idle, the more challenges you have with your emission systems.

And of course, truck and trailer aerodynamics were a big part of the fuel-saving strategy. Tractors are top-of-the-line aero models. Trailers are fitted with side skirts and drag-reducing trailer end fairings.

Weston: We take advantage of the aerodynamic options that are available with our trucks.

Everybody out there is taking advantage of these things, but we put in the aero packages when we spec these trucks to make sure that we’re getting the most fuel-efficient units possible. We did it early on with our trailer skirts, with their side skirts. We do the wind bumps, not the trailer tails. I guess they call them trailer tails, but they’re basically bumps on the side, that are fixed. They change the airflow, help lessen the drag, and improve fuel efficiency.

Shoreland Transport bought into NRCan’s Green Freight program for funding of many of its fuel-saving initiatives, including load optimization.

Weston: When we’re spec’ing the trailers, we spec them with vertical e-track and use the VertiTrack bars to optimize our loads. With our product, a lot of times, we cube out before we weigh out. So we can’t stack the pallets because of the nature of the packaging. Styrofoam boxes — we can’t stack them one on top of the other. So with the VertiTrack, we’re able to get more payload in our trailers, and therefore, we reduce the amount of trucks that are on the road.

Still, somewhere in Shoreland’s future is an electrified fleet. The company is examining local applications but is still hesitant about the cost.

Weston: We have looked at electric trucks and the option within our network, whether it’s for our distribution network, and that’s what we’ve talked about. It’s not there yet because it’s cost-prohibitive for us to be able to do that with electric trucks — the costing of it, the infrastructure required.

The infrastructure is not there for us on the long-haul side, so that’s why we thought maybe we could do something on our distribution network within a local area. But it just didn’t make sense from a cost standpoint at this point in time, but you never know down the road. We’re always looking at those innovative ideas to grow our business.