Kenworth Truck Co., Kirkland, Wash., took its Kenworth T680 Advantage truck on the road this summer as part of its “Efficiency in Motion” tour, which visited numerous Kenworth-dealer-hosted events throughout the United States and Canada to show the truck’s fuel efficiency and cost savings. The company completed the tour Oct. 1.

Even the smallest beverage distributors in today’s marketplace have a vastly expanded range of products to market. Thus, they’re increasingly turning to fleet vehicles — large and small — to promote many smaller and newer brands with eye-catching mobile graphics.

Just a few decades ago, beverage fleet managers worked with a well-established and generally predictable set of equipment-related variables to arrive at a total fleet operating cost that could be factored in to the wholesale product prices charged by a distributor.

Beverage Industry recently surveyed a sample of its readers to gain insight into the size and makeup of current delivery fleets, future vehicle purchase plans, as well as operational concerns and strategies.

Tires, by a wide margin, are the top maintenance cost for most beverage fleets. Containing these costs requires frequent, thorough inspections and diligently maintaining proper tire pressure to prevent a tire’s early demise.

Highlighting its Freightliner Trucks Business Class M2, Daimler Trucks North America LLC’s Freightliner trucks offer the M2 106 and M2 112, which both feature best-in-class visibility with a 2,500-square-inch windshield and have numerous manual, automated and automatic transmission choices, the company says.

Beverage truck news continues to show a mixed bag for 2014 as many truck manufacturers are still in a “holding pattern” due to economic uncertainty.

As noted in last month’s article on the shift from straight trucks to tractor-trailer combinations, the bottler/distributor consolidation and SKU proliferation of the last decade have had an unprecedented impact on the beverage industry, and more specifically, on beverage fleet operations.

Wayne Childress, vice president of sales for the beverage and engineered vehicles division of Mickey Truck Bodies Inc., retired from the High Point, N.C.-based company after a 29-year career.

The first decade of the 21st century saw profound change in the beverage industry, with an exponential explosion of product SKUs taking place at the same time as unprecedented levels of bottler and distributor consolidation.