Grip taps industry veteran to lead cold chain fulfillment

In the cold chain world, every box of frozen food that lands on a doorstep carries a cost decision made days earlier. One example: five pounds of dry ice, or 15? Undershoot and the product arrives thawed. Overshoot and the brand pays to move weight it never needed. That calculation, repeated across millions of orders, is the business Grip built.

The Miami-based cold chain fulfillment company is now handing its national operation to a 40-year veteran of frozen and refrigerated distribution. Grip said Tuesday that John Hummel will join as president of Grip Fulfillment, leading the company’s national fulfillment operations.

For the e-commerce brands that rely on Grip to move pet food, prepared meals and grocery orders, the hire brings proven experience. It’s a high-stakes industry: a shipping decision that misses by either too few pounds of refrigerant or a single day in transit eats margin or may even destroy the product.

Hummel served as president of Burris Logistics’ Custom Distribution division, where he oversaw five frozen and refrigerated distribution centers and eight direct-to-consumer fulfillment facilities. Earlier he was president of United Natural Foods Inc.’ s Central/Southeast Region, running eight distribution centers with more than $6 billion in annual sales.

Before that he led operations for 31 distribution centers at Reinhart Foodservice as the company grew from $2 billion to $7 billion. “I’ve known Juan since his ButcherBox days, and I’ve followed Grip’s journey ever since,” Hummel said. “Joining the team to lead its fulfillment operation is an incredible opportunity.”

Grip has shipped more than $3 billion in perishable goods since launching in 2022. Fulfillment centers in New Jersey, Texas, Michigan, Nevada and Florida reach more than 80% of the U. S. population within 24 hours, and the rest of the country within 48.

Why Cold Chain Fulfillment Stayed Fragmented Founder and CEO Juan Camilo Meisel was on the early team at ButcherBox, which he helped scale past $500 million, before starting Grip in 2022. The opening he saw was not consumer demand. It was the distance between that demand and the infrastructure serving it. “Consumer behavior had changed.

People now know that they can buy refrigerated and frozen items online and you also have all these beautiful brands popping up, but in the middle you have a fragmented industry,” Meisel told FreightWaves. The facilities that existed were built for pallets moving to grocery shelves, not parcels moving to porches.

“So you have multiple pallet-in, pallet-out facilities on one end where you have to work with multiple providers to get a good nationwide coverage,” Meisel said. “And it’s also just providers that are not designed for e-commerce or CPG products.” The software layer sat just as far from the freight.

“And then you have also someone else managing technology that is just not connected to what you’re seeing and what you do on the ground,” he said. The Dry Ice Math Grip’s answer was an order management system built for perishables rather than adapted from dry goods.

An OMS for perishable e-commerce has to set origin, refrigerant type, refrigerant weight, insulation, carrier and service level on every single order. “It’s a thinking software because behind it it’s making all these decisions for the final user,” Meisel said. The alternative is what Meisel calls flat logic, and he says it fails in both directions.

“You could say, ‘Hey, I’m going to ship every single one of my boxes that takes two days to get to the final customer with 10 pounds of dry ice.’ That’s a flat logic,” he said. “But the reality is that there’s a specific box that will be benefited by having 15 pounds and not 10 because you would be improving the end customer experience.

You would be reducing waste and you would be increasing your lifetime value.” The reverse is just as common. “The same order that the flat logic would require 10 pounds of dry ice can actually ship with five while maintaining high quality,” Meisel said. “Which as you know in shipping every single pound matters.”

Grip says the system reduces brand shipping costs by up to 30% and lowers shipping failures by 25%. Meisel puts the all-in number higher. “We’ve seen savings as much as 30-40% of how much our customers were spending before working with us,” he said.

“And it’s all accumulated … what percentage of the country can you cover in one day in transit versus two day in transit as well because you see different damage rates for those two.” Why a Career Operator Matters “It’s things that are crucial for humans, crucial for people. It’s things that people are feeding their families with,” Meisel said.

“And there just needs to be a super high standard of quality that comes down to the actual operation that you have on the ground, but then also all the technology and traceability of how you’re orchestrating that internally.” “John has spent nearly four decades building world-class cold-chain operations and unders