Rural cargo challenges: enhancing supply chains to lower delivery costs.

• Author: Strieker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Transportation

For a resident of rural Alaska, a routine trip to the grocery store can result in major sticker shock. For example, a box of Tide detergent in the community of Napaskiak cost $46.64, plus tax, in August 2013. In Bethel, a container of Quaker Oats costs $9.79 and a can of Spam is $5.89. A small tub of baby formula goes for $42.65 in Sitka. A gallon of milk in Barrow costs $9.99.

As high as these prices are, they could be much worse. With its small population scattered over a vast roadless area twice the size of Texas, the economics of supply and demand just don't add up for consumers. It takes a combination of federal help and close attention to cost-cutting and efficiency on the part of Alaska's transportation companies to keep costs down despite the staggering logistics of delivering basic groceries such as milk, bread, and eggs to far-flung communities.

Delivering a gallon of milk to Napaskiak, for example, requires it to be moved on almost every mode of transportation used by Lynden Transport, which has been shipping freight to Alaska since 1954, according to David Rosenzweig, vice president of marketing and media for Lynden.

Napaskiak is a village of about four hundred people on the Kuskokwim River about five miles downstream from Bethel, the regional hub.

First, the milk is picked up with a Lynden Transport truck from a distribution center in Seattle and trucked to the dock, Rosenzweig says. The trailer is loaded onto a steamship traveling from Seattle to the Port of Anchorage. There it is sent to another distribution center.

When called for by the grocer in Napaskiak, the milk is loaded onto another truck and sent to Lynden Air Cargo at the airport. It is flown to Bethel in a Lynden Air Cargo L-382 Hercules, then transferred to Alaska Hovercraft, another Lynden subsidiary, and sent down the Kuskokwim River to Napaskiak. There it is loaded onto an all-terrain vehicle trailer and taken from the banks of the river to the village grocery store, "all the while being kept at the proper temperature to not allow it to spoil," Rosenzweig says.

The process is the same for other Alaska villages such as Aniak and Allakaket, but the final leg to the village is by small airplane instead of hovercraft.

Bypass Mail

Lynden is also a bypass mail contractor. Bypass mail is a US Postal Service program that subsidizes freight deliveries to rural Alaska that is perhaps the most important factor in keeping a lid on already high prices.

Bypass mail allows...