*Sponsored by GoodShip.
Shippers know that their annual freight procurement plan may not hold up as expected throughout the contract term, but what’s less obvious is how concentrated the financial impact can be.
Across the Food & Beverage networks GoodShip analyzed, just 5% of lanes accounted for 55% of total routing guide overspend, or the additional cost paid above the primary contracted rate.
The findings reveal an opportunity for shippers to identify where routing guide performance is deteriorating, focus on the lanes creating the greatest financial exposure, and take action immediately.
A small number of lanes create outsized cost exposure
Freight overspend can feel like a network-wide problem, but the opportunity to address it may be more concentrated than shippers realize.
When primary carriers decline loads, freight moves deeper into the routing guide. Each additional tender can consume valuable lead time, leaving less flexibility to secure coverage and potentially increasing costs.
The 5% of lanes driving the most overspend ran approximately 17% above the primary contracted rate and required an average of 2.15 tenders to secure coverage. The remaining lanes ran about 10% above primary and required 1.55 tenders.
These findings highlight the relationship between tender depth, available lead time, and freight costs. Identifying the lanes where those factors are creating the greatest financial exposure gives shippers a clearer picture of where targeted intervention could have the most impact.
Routing guide coverage can mask deeper performance problems
Freight can continue moving through a routing guide even as primary carrier acceptance declines and the economics of the original award change considerably. While backup carriers may still provide coverage, that doesn't necessarily mean the routing guide is performing as intended.
Across Food & Beverage lane-level routing guides, more than 1 in 5 lost at least 10 percentage points of primary acceptance between their opening and closing three months. More than 1 in 8 lost at least 20 points.
By the final month of an annual routing-guide term, roughly 1 in 9 contracts still receiving tenders failed to cover any freight on the awarded lane. Those carriers remained in the routing guide and continued receiving tenders, but weren't providing coverage.
The rate of deterioration also varied across the network. Among Food & Beverage shippers running both reefer and dry van, reefer routing guides deteriorated about 2.7x faster than dry van.
These findings underscore the importance of automated, continuous monitoring. Technology can track primary acceptance, tender depth, and actual freight costs across thousands of lanes, automatically flagging where performance is slipping, quantifying the financial impact, and helping transportation teams prioritize action before costs escalate.
Targeted intervention can change the cost trajectory
Market conditions, capacity constraints, and shifting demand will always influence freight rates. But proactive intervention will limit additional cost exposure, even when broader market pressures continue to push costs higher.
In the networks analyzed, freight costs continued to rise following targeted lane rebids, but the pace of increase slowed by 19–41% in the first 90 days, while reliance on spot coverage fell by 27–43%.
The goal isn't necessarily to return every lane to its original contracted rate. It's to identify where routing guide performance is deteriorating and take targeted action to reduce cost exposure, limit reliance on spot, and improve network performance.
What this means for F&B shippers
For Food & Beverage shippers, improving routing guide performance requires more than identifying declining acceptance rates. It's about understanding the financial impact, prioritizing the right opportunities, and taking corrective action.
- Monitor performance and cost together. Track primary acceptance, tender depth, actual freight costs, and service performance to understand where routing guides are falling short of expectations.
- Prioritize the highest-impact opportunities. Focus on lanes where deteriorating performance is creating the greatest cost and service exposure, accounting for differences in equipment type, market conditions, and other network characteristics.
- Use technology to turn insights into action. Automate monitoring across the network, recommend corrective measures, and enable systematic actions such as rate renegotiations, targeted mini-bids, and routing guide adjustments.
For many transportation teams, this level of visibility and responsiveness is difficult to achieve. Tender activity, contracted rates, carrier performance, market benchmarks, accessorials, and service data often live across disconnected systems.
GoodShip brings freight procurement, analytics, and network optimization together in a single platform. From managing RFPs and awarding freight to monitoring tender activity, rates, and carrier performance after go-live, GoodShip connects procurement decisions to actual network performance.
By continuously analyzing this data alongside market benchmarks, the platform identifies and prioritizes cost and service opportunities, recommends corrective actions, and enables shippers to take action through targeted mini-bids, rate renegotiations, and routing guide adjustments.
The result is a clearer picture of where routing guide performance is falling short, what's driving the greatest financial exposure, and where to take action.
See how GoodShip helps leading shippers optimize their freight networks → Request a demo
About the data
This analysis is based on anonymized transportation data across multiple Food & Beverage shipper networks from 2023–2026, representing approximately 2.7 million loads across more than 22,000 lanes. It examines how awarded routing guides performed after go-live, including tender acceptance, routing guide depth, and cost relative to primary contracted rates.
