Derrick Wolfe, a second-generation trucker, has spent the last eight years building a pretty sweet business for himself in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.
Wolfe, a semi-finalist for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ award, has grown his food-grade tank business hauling liquid sweeteners from being the sole operator at its founding in 2017 to a roll call of 21 company drivers, seven owner-operators, and 10 non-driving employees.
"My father was a truck driver," Wolfe said, noting he also hauled sweetener, along with wine and juice. The younger Wolfe hauls the same along with vinegar and edible oils. "I grew up around it and rode with him all the time. I knew that's all I ever wanted to do."
Wolfe entered the trucking business working for a sweetener company and "loved the job. Didn't love the truck so much," he said. "I didn't love a lot of things about working for a big corporation and just always wanted to own my own."
Wolfe's passion for trucks shines in how he runs his business, having his company drivers choose their trucks' features when they come up for trade-in every 5 years or 500,000 miles. Wolfe specs the powertrain himself -- all Cummins power (565 hp and 2,050 lb.-ft. torque) wrapped in Paccar everything else.
Drivers select the color, interior trim and any add-ons, like chrome and lights.
"Our drivers are allowed to choose between Kenworth or Peterbilt," Wolfe elaborated. Road drivers choose sleeper size, too, in addition to interior package and those extras. "Lights and visors and window chops and stuff. And we just have incorporated that into the personality of the truck that fits the driver."
Put all the trucks in a row together and it's a "jellybean fleet," Wolfe laughed, describing the myriad hues that have been the result. "The truck I drive every day is a deep maroon with a really thin black pinstripe. A lot of my guys have Seminole paint jobs on their Peterbilts; one's champagne and orange. I have a Legendary Brown with champagne pinstriping. We've got a hunter green, a navy blue, a wine purple ... all sorts of colors."
Wolfe keeps his personal truck on the road daily for a few reasons, mostly out of necessity. But it's also a matter of authenticity.
"I try my best to stay relevant," he said. "While I am trying to grow the company and steer it in the right direction and be that person, I'm also the person that's in a truck doing the same job [the drivers] are every single day," showing up to customers and delivering loads.
"There's a lot of trucking companies that the owner is the operations manager, or the safety guy, or whoever it may be, and never sees a customer," he added. "Or the drivers feel like [the owner is] out of touch or they've never done the job, or they sit in this ivory tower with their feet up on the desk. Whether that's true or not, that's the perception, and I try to bust that perception."
Drivers' perception of Wolfe as a manager must be a good one. He estimated that he's lost a grand total of four people since he opened shop eight years ago, adding that he spends a lot of time trying to be the kind of person people really want to work for.
This is one of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that will air throughout this month. (Access all of the published stories via this link.) Two finalists in each category (3-10 trucks, 11-30 trucks) will be announced in October.
The second ingredient in the secret sauce: "Competitive, if not a little bit better, pay than everybody else," he said. Wolfe pays his company drivers a percentage of the rate (26% to start with a cap of 28%) plus accessorials. Leased owner operators get 75% of the linehaul rate plus 100% of fuel. Independents get 85% of the rate and 100% of fuel.
Drivers have guaranteed daily or weekly home time. Employees are offered multiple health insurance options, likewise dental, vision, and company-provided life insurance coverage with accidental death and dismemberment. The company also matches its employees' 401K contributions at 5%.
Staying afloat, continuing growth, in tough times
Derrick Wolfe followed his father into the trucking business hauling sweeteners, wine and juice -- niches in which the younger Wolfe also dabbles, along with vinegar and edible oils.
The tough freight economy of the last three years hasn't spared Wolfe or his Bloomfield, New York-based business, but hauling consumer staples like sweetener (and booze) has blunted the impact somewhat.
"We've felt it like everybody, but I think we felt it to a lesser of a degree because we are in that specialized niche business," he said. "We've had to get cheaper on our rates. We've had to become leaner in the way we run our organization, and we've had to find a way to cut costs while maintaining the level of service that we want to continue to offer our customers. It's been a really big challenge."
Wolfe said he's had to take a strategic look at the company's customer base and developed an internal rating system to determine which trucks and customers are driving the company's bottom line.
"A lot of carriers, they're all about cost-per-mile. But I've always had a problem with that because your cost-per-mile varies with how many miles you run. So it's never made sense to me, I guess," he said. "I look at it on a cost-per-day basis. We have an internal calculator that we built that basically breaks down our cost per-truck per-day. And what goes into that is not only the truck and the driver itself, but all of our extra overhead, too."
[Related: Calculate any load's cost in relation to time, not just miles]
Wolfe uses three data points: truck cost-per-day, and fixed and variable truck cost-per-day, and builds a target margin into that. "When we're rating something, say it's a local load that you might be able to do three or four of in a day, obviously we don't associate the entire cost of that truck for the day just to that one load if we're able to stack multiple loads on it," he said. "And then it's just a formula that carries out from there. You don't always get what you want, so negotiations carry on from there, but that's how we get our target."
Baldwin Richardson Foods Supply Planner Jennifer Scott said Derrick Wolfe and his drivers are well-known for being dependable and for their professionalism.
Wolfe's diversified business holdings in recent years with a food grade-certified wash bay and opened it up to his peers.
"We're washing other carriers' food grade tankers ... and we're trying to grow that as its own profit center to help the trucking side," he said.
Growth on the trucking side, Wolfe said, is tactical. The wine and juice portion of Wolfe's business has grown through word of mouth and reputation. "We don't have a salesman," he said. "We don't solicit. It's just all done organically."
Wolfe said he doesn't chase new customers in any aspects of his company, but rather prefers to grow alongside his existing customer base. "As our customers grow, we grow with them," he said. "The last couple of years, there really hasn't been a ton of growth, but looking at the rest of this year and into next year, one of my customers is building a new plant and is increasing volume. Another customer has gained another couple of customers of their own, so we're going to increase volume there."
Wolfe has been a carrier partner for Macedon, New York-based Baldwin Richardson Foods (BRF), a full-service liquid products supplier and strategic partner to the food and beverage industry, and is the house carrier for the company's liquid sweetener suppliers. Over the many years Wolfe's served them, said Supply Planner Jennifer Scott, Derrick Wolfe and his drivers have consistently exceeded expectations.
The National Association of Small Trucking Companies sponsors the Small Fleet Championship. Finalists receive a year's worth of membership in the association, with access to a myriad of benefits from NASTC's well-known fuel program to drug and alcohol testing services and much more. All will be recognized at the association's annual conference, where the winners will be announced in late October in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
[Related: Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists not afraid to get their hands dirty]
Advocacy, community involvement
Wolfe is a member of the Trucking Association of New York -- a group that has been fighting the state's implementation of emissions rules borne out of California and a Congestion Pricing Plan the association argues unfairly targets trucking and logistics companies, which are charged far higher rates than passenger vehicles.
He's also a supporter of Truckers Against Trafficking and recently sponsored the Suicide Awareness Coalition of Livingston County. His company supports multiple youth sports leagues and sponsored a local rally for the "back the blue" cause.
[Related: Meet Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists]
