Where does a logistics company find a van when it does not own one?
By Muhamed Selmani, Founder
A logistics company that owns no vehicles buys the capacity. It wins the contract, then sources it from subcontracted operators, direct or through a courier exchange. How that work is bought decides reliability, and how a driver shortage lands: a round bought on the morning competes for whoever is free that morning; a contracted route was allocated before that competition started. A set driver, a named backup and one accountable contract turn a network into a route.
The name on the invoice is not always the name on the van
Ask an ops director who delivers their chilled order and you get the name on the invoice. Ask who owns the van at the kerb and it can be a different company entirely. That is not a scandal and it is not hidden: it is subcontracting, and how a contractor does it decides what turns up at your door.
The structure is simple. One company holds the commercial relationship — it prices the work, signs the contract, carries the liability and answers the phone when a drop is missed. Another supplies the vehicle and the driver. The first is a contractor with a network; the second is an operator with an asset. Fleetable works this way, and a buyer who understands the mechanics can tell a good version from a bad one in about five questions.
The model exists because of the arithmetic of ownership. A van bought for a peak stands still through the trough and depreciates on a Sunday, and no amount of good management makes a parked vehicle cheaper. A contractor that buys capacity per route pays for a vehicle on the days the route runs, which is why there are no vans on your cost line between jobs. That is an advantage about cost rather than about service.
What a courier exchange actually is
A courier exchange is a private online marketplace for haulage work. A member company with a job to cover posts it — the collection, the delivery, the vehicle class, the times — and other member companies take it or quote for it. The load moves under the posting company's contract. The vehicle belongs to whoever accepted the posting. Exchanges differ in their rules, their membership and what they require of an operator before it can join — questions for the exchange rather than facts to assume.
What an exchange does well is find a vehicle quickly across a wide area, which is genuinely hard. What it does not do is make a decision about your business. It is a matching layer rather than a management layer: it does not know that your Thursday order is the one the kitchen builds its prep around, and it holds no view on whether last week's driver should run the round again.
So an exchange is not the thing that decides whether your delivery arrives. The buying policy of the company using it is. Two providers can work through the same exchange, reach the same operators and drive the same roads, and deliver service that looks nothing alike.
Why courier reliability varies so much
The difference is how the work is bought. A round bought the way a one-off delivery is bought inherits every property of one, including the ones that do not matter for a parcel and matter enormously for a kitchen.
Four ways a network job comes apart
- It is allocated on price and proximity. Whoever is cheapest and nearest that morning takes it — the right rule for a pallet and the wrong one for a standing order into a production kitchen.
- There is no continuity of driver. A new person finds the goods-in door, the buzzer and the crate count from scratch, and everything they learn is thrown away when the run ends.
- Nobody is accountable when it misses. The contractor blames the operator, the operator blames the traffic, and the client holds two suppliers and no answer.
- There is nothing behind it. A driver calls in sick at 05:30 and the job goes back onto the exchange at the worst hour of the week to buy one.
The driver shortage, and what it does to your Tuesday
The UK driver shortage has been reported in headline numbers for years, and those numbers move with the method and the source, so a single figure is worth treating with suspicion whoever quotes it. The operational effect is easier to observe. When drivers are scarce, the spot market prices them, and the work that gets covered is the work that pays most or the work that was promised first.
For a food business that is the whole of the shortage story. A round bought on the morning competes for a driver on the morning. A round contracted in advance is a place in somebody's week that was allocated before the competition started. Scarcity does not make the second kind immune — it makes the first kind volatile in precisely the weeks you can least afford volatility.
It also changes who you compete against. Your chilled round is not bidding against other chilled rounds — it is bidding against pallets, parcels and everything else that fits in the same van at the same hour, most of it with a looser window than a kitchen has.
Subcontractor vetting: ask for the mechanism
If the vehicle is not the contractor's, the vetting is the product. It is also the part of a tender most often answered with an adjective. The useful questions are mechanical, and a real network answers them without checking.
What to ask any provider that subcontracts
- Who is the operator on my route, and is it the same operator every week? If the answer is a rota, ask how long the rota is.
- What must an operator hold before it can take my work — licence, insurance, training, checks — and who verifies it rather than filing it?
- Whose insurance responds when a load is lost or spoiled, and what is the limit? Public liability is not cargo cover anywhere in the industry. Standard haulage conditions of carriage cap liability by weight rather than by value, and light, expensive chilled product sits well above that line.
- What happens on the day a driver is ill? A name is an answer. A phone number is not.
- Who do I ring at 06:00, and can that person move a vehicle or only take a message?
- What is the operator told about the load, and how does it reach the driver rather than the office? Your instructions flow to the carrier, so the test is whether the person at the wheel has what you wrote down.
- What do you refuse? A network that has never turned down a route has never checked whether it could hold one.
What turns a network into a route
A network is a way of finding a vehicle. A route is a commitment about a particular vehicle, at a particular time, on a particular list of doors. Three things convert one into the other, and none requires owning an asset.
The three that do the work
- A set driver. The same person week after week, who knows which of the eight arch doors is yours and that the goods-in contact does not start before 07:00. Familiarity is not sentiment — it is minutes saved on the door and mistakes not made.
- A named backup. Not an undertaking to try, but a second operator who has run the same round and can pick it up. This is the part a job-by-job network structurally cannot do, because nothing stands behind a job that was allocated an hour ago.
- One accountable contract. One party that priced the work, signed for it and answers for it, with one named contact who can move a vehicle rather than log a complaint.
The honest limits of the model
Fleetable is a capacity network. It owns no vans, contracts capacity route by route, and fulfils contracted routes through vetted operators. What is sold is not the vehicle, because anyone can find a vehicle. It is the set driver, the named backup and the single accountable contract wrapped around a vehicle somebody else owns — and the willingness to prove it on one route in parallel before anything switches.
Two things that structure cannot do. It cannot conjure a driver where none is available on your day: coverage past a dense operating area is a question about people, and the honest answer is sometimes no. And it cannot make a structurally expensive route cheap — a single small drop buys a whole vehicle whoever owns it, and the fix is density rather than a smaller van.
None of this argues that networks beat fleets. It argues that the question worth asking a supplier is not whether they own the van, but how they buy the week.
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