The Kroger Co. · 62 US sites, mapped from satellite
The Yard Network System, by FreightRoll.
Your plants make the product. Your yards decide how much of it ships.
Kroger runs 33 of its own food production plants, from dairy and bakery to deli and beverage, then ships through 20 banner DCs, 5 Ocado-automated fulfillment centers, and Home Chef. You are adding a $391 million automated DC in Franklin, Kentucky on top of it. A plant can only sell what its yard ships, and a DC can only move what its yard turns. Every one of those 62 sites still ends the same way. A truck at a gate, and a clock running.
YardFlow is the Yard Network System, the software layer between your TMS and your WMS. It puts every yard, plant and DC, gated and open, on one standard. Primo Brands has implemented the driver journey system wide, cut trailer turn times by 50%, and shipped about 5% more volume on the same dock-office headcount. The audit shows where the same gain sits in your network.
- The gapYour TMS runs the road, your WMS runs the building, nothing runs the yards.
- What we doOne digital standard for all sites. EZ-Pass at the gate, air-traffic control for the trailers.
- The proofPrimo: about 5% more volume on flat headcount, turns cut 48 to 24, and 100% of the network committed.
- The payoffReduce turn times, gain 5% capacity per location. Eliminate paper and detention expenses. No change to headcount.
Already live at scale · the Primo Brands network
The Yard Network System runs the yards behind these household brands. Live today, rolling to 100% of the network.
Using actual results from Primo Brands, we modeled the potential prize for Kroger.
Proven at Primo, modeled across the network
The problem
Every yard "does it their own way." That is not strategy. That is drift.
Ask two of your sites and we would expect the same line: our yards are different.
In our experience they are not. Same trucks, same trailers, same moves. What differs is the workaround each site improvised, hardened into a process nobody chose. A dairy plant gates and guards its yard one way. A King Soopers DC in Aurora runs 320 dock doors behind another gate. A new Ocado center runs wide open. Same company, three yard models, no shared playbook. The Franklin DC automates the building, and our read is that the yard outside it inherits the same drift. Across the 62 sites we mapped, we count 4,046 dock doors and room for about 9,055 trailers. We cannot see from orbit what runs them. Legacy YMS was built to run one site, not a network. You would know whether your 33 plants and the rest run to one standard. We would bet they do not.
Why now
You are pouring $391 million into the building. The yard sets the ceiling.
You just committed $391 million to an automated DC in Franklin while you consolidate the fulfillment side, closing three sites and a planned Charlotte center.
Every site you close pushes its volume onto the yards that are left. You can spin a DC up to ship ten percent more. It ships nothing if the yard cannot turn ten percent more trucks. Your yards are the cap on what your network can move. Pour money into the building and leave the yard on paper, and the new DC waits on the old gate. For the first time in four years, pricing power is swinging to carriers as capacity tightens. The next spot market will punish shippers whose yards burn a driver's afternoon. Detention starts at hour two and runs $50 to $100 an hour, and carriers now pick their shippers. Every printed BOL, every forced check-in, every trailer a driver hunts down is added cost. Fix the yards and the capacity you could not see starts to surface. For perishables the clock is unforgiving. A reefer your yards lose today is shrink this week.
The Yard Network System
A new layer of your stack, between the TMS and the WMS.
Every yard runs the same jobs, whether it is a dairy plant, a banner DC, or an Ocado center, and the same people run them. The Yard Network System gives each of them one standard across every site. The driver checks in from their phone with flowDRIVER. The spotter moves the trailer while a cab camera maps the yard with flowTWIN. The dock coordinator assigns the door from flowYMS. The dock office signs the BOL with flowBOL. The executive watches every yard on flowNETWORK. Under all of it, machine vision reads the truck at the gate and an agent dispatches the next move. Think EZ-Pass at the gate and air-traffic control for your trailers.
The proof · already at scale
No company had ever put its whole yard network on one system. Primo just did.
The point is not faster trucks. It is realized production capacity: 5% more volume out the door on the same headcount, capacity those plants could not ship before.
Primo started with one layer: the driver journey. Text the truck instead of checking it in. Paper out of the gate. No more driver-to-dock-office handoff. Across the 24 sites where it went live, those yards shipped about 5% more volume than the sites without it, on the same dock-office headcount. That alone is why Primo committed all ~260 sites to the full Yard Network System, the first national shipper to standardize every yard on one protocol. The YMS is rolling now. Live at 10 plants, every production site by the end of Q3. The highest-volume campus is going fully automated end to end, on a trailer map that updates itself in real time. The 5% came from the lightest touch. The rest is still ahead. Kroger would be the first grocer to put its plants and both DC models, gated and open, on one protocol.
“Your software enabled us to take on additional volume while remaining headcount neutral in the dock office. That was an integral part of our strategy, and it has been proven.”
Result measured on the driver-journey layer, before the YMS rollout. Primo is live at 10 plants today, every production site by the end of Q3.
What it touches
A new layer, not a new migration.
YardFlow runs in the yard and talks to the systems you already have. Your TMS and WMS stay the systems of record. Nobody is ripping anything out.
Built for enterprise infosec review. We connect over your standard API or EDI and scope to yard operations, not your ERP of record. Full integration and security review happen in the audit.
- In the yardflowDRIVER (driver app, no install) and flowGATE (camera gate) run on YardFlow. Nothing changes on the plant floor.
- ReadsYour TMS appointments, over standard API or EDI.
- WritesGate and turn events back to your WMS, so dock and inventory stay current.
- IT liftOne connection per system. No rip-and-replace, no platform migration.
Your own audit
This is Kroger's own audit, not a generic benchmark. We mapped 62 sites from satellite, 33 owned plants plus the banner DCs and fulfillment centers. Here is what the handoffs cost today, and where the standard lands first.
- 58 of 62
- Already run drop yardswhere the 48 to 24 minute drop-and-hook win lands
- 43 of 62
- Gated with a guard or boothflowGATE automates the check-in step
- 59 of 62
- Long entry drives where queues buildpre-arrival check-in keeps the queue off the road
See all 62 sitesOpen the audit →We are not asking for a pilot. We are asking for a conversation.
A 30-minute call, direct with Casey. We show you what we found on your network, you tell us straight where it fits. We will not tell you which site to start at. We have only seen your yards from orbit. You run them, so you already know which one goes first. If the call goes well, we talk about where that is. If the call does not land, you keep the analysis.
None of these times work? Email me at casey@freightroll.com or call or text me at 410-236-7434, and we’ll find one.
Casey Larkin, YardFlow. Jake, our founder, joins when it helps.
