Twenty-One Filings in Thirty Days: From One-Truck Chicago Carriers to a $342 Million Distributor, the Freight Bankruptcy List Keeps Growing

The latest batch of freight bankruptcies, compiled by FreightWaves from court dockets and cross-checked against PACER records, runs to twenty-one companies in a month: twelve motor carriers, three logistics and warehousing operators, and six distributors whose trucks were the last thing on their balance sheets. Seven went straight to Chapter 7 liquidation; fourteen filed Chapter 11. The through-line is not a single failed business model. It is thin assets against debt that stopped being serviceable once rates eased and fuel climbed.

The carriers: mostly small, several tiny

The largest fleet in the batch is Anchor South Transport of Albertville, Alabama — fourteen trucks and twelve drivers, Chapter 11 on July 28 with about $1.4 million in assets against roughly $2.2 million in liabilities. Below it the sizes fall away fast. Aneiro's Trucking in Moreno Valley, California, ran six trucks; The Power of Peek Trucking in Lithonia, Georgia, two. DD Freight Express outside Chicago had once run forty trucks with forty drivers and filed Chapter 7 with eight tractors left. And three Illinois carriers — R3 Hauling in Northbrook, AP Freight in Lake Zurich, D.A.R. Carrier in Oak Lawn — each ran exactly one truck with one driver.

One number in the list deserves a second look. PLR Transport of Pembroke Pines, Florida, scheduled $21,520 in assets against $5.33 million in liabilities — a ratio of roughly 250 to 1. That is not a fleet that ran out of loads; it is a shell that had already lost its equipment and kept its obligations. Chapter 7 filings like PLR's and PJM Distributors' in North Miami Beach come with the standard notation that no funds are expected to remain for unsecured creditors, which in practice means the factoring companies, fuel-card issuers and repair shops that extended them credit.

The logistics side: cold storage, cross-border, forwarding

Three filings are supply-chain operators rather than carriers. Royal Cold Storage of Beverly Hills, California, once a 118,000-square-foot refrigerated warehouse with 14,500 pallet positions, filed Chapter 11 on August 25 with assets and liabilities both below $50,000 — a facility that had effectively wound down before it reached the court. Inclusive Logistics of El Paso, a cross-border operator with two warehouses totaling about 113,000 square feet, filed Chapter 11 on August 8 in the Western District of Texas with $1 million to $10 million on each side of the ledger and 50 to 99 creditors. Jet-Speed Logistics (USA), an international freight forwarder and customs broker in Illinois, filed on August 25 with liabilities of $1 million to $10 million against under $100,000 in assets and between 200 and 999 creditors.

The big one: BFG Supply

The batch's largest case is not a carrier at all. BFG Supply Co. of Indianapolis, a distributor of horticultural and agricultural products with fifteen warehouses and more than 100,000 SKUs, filed Chapter 11 in Delaware on August 18 together with sixteen affiliated entities. The filings describe more than two years of compounding operational, financial and liquidity deterioration: acquisition debt that was never fully integrated, turnover on the sales staff that took accounts with it, and vendors tightening credit as the numbers slipped. Funded debt at filing was about $342.5 million against roughly $2 million of cash; the company secured $55 million in debtor-in-possession financing and is pursuing a sale of the business rather than a stand-alone reorganization. The schedules list more than 100,000 creditors and state that no funds will be available for unsecured creditors once administrative expenses are paid.

Rounding out the distributors: Great Southern Copackers in Lakeland, Florida (beverage manufacturing, Chapter 11, August 20), Emil's Produce in Brooklyn (two power units, Chapter 11, August 12), seafood wholesaler NJS Partners in Port Chester, New York (Chapter 11, August 11), ML Imports in Edison, New Jersey (Chapter 11 on August 7, following litigation over diverted business and a court-ordered disgorgement), and PJM Distributors in North Miami Beach (Chapter 7, August 12).

The backdrop: fuel up, rates down

The thirty days covered by the list coincide with the sharpest fuel move of the year. EIA's national on-highway diesel average went from $5.134 a gallon on July 20 to $5.652 on August 24 — up 52 cents in five weeks, with a 20-cent jump in the final week alone. Over the same stretch spot rates drifted lower, not higher, as seasonal volume faded. For a carrier on a fuel card and a factoring line, that combination is the arithmetic of a Chapter 7 petition: the fuel bill arrives in days, the freight payment in weeks, and the gap is the margin that no longer exists.

Nobody publishes a running tally of freight bankruptcies, and a twenty-one-company month tells you the direction more than the size of the exit. But the shape of the list is the story: one-truck carriers in Chicago, a fourteen-truck fleet in Alabama, a cold-storage warehouse that emptied before it filed, and a $342 million distributor whose trucks were never the problem. The capacity leaving the market is leaving one docket at a time.