Ali Pearson joined Schreiber Foods 10 years ago in a customer service position, but the last decade has been a crash course in building a logistics business from the ground up — one that recently earned Schreiber two industry awards for excellence in supply chain management and logistics.
“I had no sales background, definitely no systems background, but at this point I feel like I could build some type of code,” jokes Pearson, a Green Bay native who holds a communications degree from UW-Green Bay.
Pearson played a key role in launching The Hitch, Schreiber’s consolidation and distribution service. Today The Hitch supports manufacturers nationwide in freight transportation, but it began in 2019 with a single customer request for refrigerated product consolidation. Pearson was asked to manage the project, which at the time was thought of as a one-off special request.
“But we realized there was something to this,” Pearson says. “There was an opportunity to expand the way that we support our customers and also expand our partnerships with different suppliers.”
Pearson says it was essentially building a startup within Schreiber, a private label dairy manufacturing company. It came with hurdles, not the least of which was establishing The Hitch as a serious player in cold chain logistics using Schreiber’s extensive refrigerated network.
That required educating potential customers as well as reframing the mindsets of internal team members.
“You have to think differently when you’re going from a manufacturing system to shipping, and trying to change what this entire company was built on,” Pearson says. “I have to bring the energy and the excitement and really show suppliers how we can reduce complexity.”
In five years, The Hitch went from managing one 500,000-pound project for a single supplier to moving hundreds of millions of pounds of product through six distribution centers for nearly 20 suppliers. And it continues to evolve, Pearson says. The Hitch is working to expand from strictly cold storage into different temperature zones including ambient, or dry, storage as well as frozen.
Pearson says the recent industry recognition validates what the team has built.
“That’s what we’ve been fighting for, and it’s so cool to see it finally pay off,” she says.
