SONAR adds bulk rates

For years, bulk trucking was one of the few big freight markets where buyers could price a load only by calling around and comparing a handful of quotes. On April 8, SONAR said it had started publishing standardized bulk trucking contract benchmarks through its application programming interface, or software feed, instead of leaving that segment in the dark. (finance.yahoo.com) Bulk trucking is the part of trucking that moves loose commodities like grain, cement, sand, chemicals, and feed in tanks, hoppers, and dump-style equipment. It behaves differently from dry van freight because the trailer, unloading method, cleaning rules, and round-trip planning can change the price as much as the miles do. (finance.yahoo.com) That is why this corner of the market stayed opaque for so long. SONAR said the new product gives outbound state-level contract prices and round-trip rates, which are two of the core numbers bulk shippers usually had to piece together manually. (covartransport.com) SONAR is the market-intelligence platform built by FreightWaves, and it already tracks trucking, rail, ocean, and air data across more than 300,000 freight data points. Its shipper-facing Supply Chain Intelligence product says it uses paid shipper invoice data valued at $125 billion, which is why SONAR markets its rates as a view into what large shippers are actually paying, not just what brokers are asking. (gosonar.com 1) (gosonar.com 2) Before this launch, SONAR’s best-known trucking rate products were strongest in dry van, refrigerated, and flatbed freight. The company says its Trusted Rate Assessment Consortium publishes spot rates on hundreds of thousands of lanes for those equipment types, so bulk was the obvious missing piece if a shipper wanted one screen for most domestic truck modes. (gosonar.com 1) (gosonar.com 2) The practical use case is procurement. A food company that buys dry van capacity for packaged goods and bulk capacity for ingredients can now compare both inside the same data stack instead of running one sourcing process off dashboards and another off phone calls. (gosonar.com) (finance.yahoo.com) The format matters too. SONAR launched bulk rates in its application programming interface first, which means carriers, shippers, and logistics software vendors can plug the benchmarks directly into routing guides, procurement tools, and internal dashboards instead of treating them like a static report. (covartransport.com) FreightWaves has spent the past two years pushing SONAR deeper into forecasting and benchmarking, including updates announced in June 2024 around shipper procurement and rate intelligence. The bulk launch fits that pattern: take a market where pricing is still negotiated by feel, then turn it into a benchmark that can be compared, stored, and audited. (freightwaves.com) (finance.yahoo.com) The bigger shift is not that bulk freight suddenly became simple on April 8. It is that one of trucking’s least standardized segments now has a published reference rate, and once a reference rate exists, every bid, renewal, and carrier meeting starts from a different baseline. (finance.yahoo.com)