Carolina Freight's quantity of quality.

• Position: Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award runner-up

Carolina Freight Corp. spent more than $150,000 in hopes of walking away with the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award only to come in as a runner-up.

But to hear management tell it, the customers are the big winners. "It forced us to look critically at a whole lot of things that we're doing," says Ken Mayhew, the Cherryville-based company's president and CEO.

The Baldridge Award is the government's incentive to corporate excellence, and Carolina Freight was one of only 19 finalists. Employees spent 5,000 hours on a 450-page document that was whittled down to a 75-page application. Doug Williams, quality-improvement director since '84, says: "|The process~ is an investment in the future. You cannot put a price on that."

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