Backhaul might be the most promised and underdelivered idea in freight. It turns up in every sales pitch, usually right after the slide about visibility, and then quietly disappears once the contract is signed. In most cases, it’s because a provider that earns a markup on every load has no great reason to find you a cheaper rate.
At KBX Logistics™, we’ve watched that happen from the shipper’s side of the table.
We ran Koch’s freight long before we ran anyone else’s, and with the bill for every wasted trip home landing on our own desk, we learned to go find the backhaul ourselves.
To this day, that’s still how we run freight for outside shippers, and network optimization is how we do it. However, the method matters less than the motive.
In this article, we discuss the five reasons a Koch-owned 3PL like us raises the backhaul opportunity you’d miss, starting with where we came from.
1. We Started Out Paying for Our Own Empty Miles
Before we had a single outside customer, we were Koch’s in-house freight operation. We began as Georgia-Pacific’s™ transportation function, became KBX Logistics in 2015, and grew to run freight for the rest of Koch’s companies. Every truck that came home empty on those lanes came out of our own budget.
When the empty miles are your own, you notice them.
We learned to read every lane as a round trip and to go looking for a load to fill the trip home before anybody asked. That reflex is why we spot backhauls a bid sheet often skips right past.
We kept that reflex when we opened our operations to outside shippers, and it’s what “for shippers, by shippers” means in practice. We look at your freight the way we learned to look at our own, with the trip home counted as part of the cost.
2. Our Scale Fills Your Trip Home
Spotting an empty trip home only helps if you have something to put on the truck, and that’s where scale comes in. We move 8,000+ domestic loads a day across 2,000+ trade lanes, so there’s a good chance some of our freight starts near where yours ends.
When it does, the equation changes. Your outbound load and our truckload freight headed the other way become a round trip; the carrier gets paid in both directions, and your rate drops because the truck no longer has to price in an empty drive home.
The savings are real too.
With ATRI putting 2025 trucking costs at a record $2.336 a mile and deadhead at 16.5%, our calculations say empty miles add roughly $277 to the average 600-mile load.
Sure, a broker can find you a truck. But filling its trip home takes freight that’s already moving, and we have plenty.
3. We’re Paid on Efficiency
Most 3PLs earn a markup on every load they move, which makes a backhaul awkward.
It lowers your rate, the markup shrinks with it, and nobody enjoys pitching a smaller paycheck, so the idea tends to stay in the drawer.
We were built to make money another way. Our margin lives in the efficiency, so a leaner network is good news on our side of the table too. That’s why our team flags a backhaul that cuts your spend and our load count in the same breath.
Grill any provider on how they get paid when your total cost of ownership goes down.
If the answer needs a whiteboard, you’ve found the reason nobody’s mentioned a backhaul. Our margin keeps us pointed in the same direction as you, and that’s what a true freight management relationship looks like.
4. We Look at Your Whole Network Before Rates
A lowest-bid RFP asks every lane the same question: What’s the cheapest truck? Never will you hear: “Where does that truck go next?” That’s exactly where backhauls hide, and it’s why low-cost transportation strategies built on rate alone keep missing them.
We start from the other end. We load your origin-destination file into KBX TM™, our own TMS, and plan it alongside the freight we already run across truckload, rail and intermodal, and the railcars, trailers, and chassis we manage.
Seeing everything together is what network optimization means in practice. Your lanes stop competing with each other for the cheapest rate, and we finally notice the backhaul that’s been sitting in your data. Sometimes it turns out to be a lane that belongs on rail.
5. A Paid Trip Home Keeps Your Trucks Showing Up
We also push backhauls because we’ve been the shipper when capacity got tight.
A lane with a paid trip home holds up when the market turns, because the carrier wants that freight, and wanting it is the only loyalty you can count on.
MIT researchers asked whether carriers reward shippers who treated them well in soft markets, and their paper’s title, “Elephants or Goldfish?”, gives away the answer. Carriers have short memories and take the freight that pays best now.
This latest cycle proved it. Tender rejections peaked above 17.5%, and FreightWaves found shippers paying up just to keep routing guides intact. A backhaul built into your lane costs less than a premium rate to hold capacity, and we learned that by paying for both.
Stop Managing Freight. Start Managing the Business.
That’s why the backhaul still comes up with us after the contract’s signed. We raise it because we used to pay for empty miles; we have freight to fill them; we earn more when your network runs lean; we plan the whole network; and we know what a paid trip home does for your capacity.
Even Koch companies get surprised by what a hard look turns up.
On the Halsey project, Georgia-Pacific’s Jim Lowman told our team, “I didn’t think there would be much opportunity here … but clearly, there is a big opportunity.” That work took 57% out of conveyor shipping costs, and your network is probably hiding something too.
Finding it takes network optimization and a managed freight provider that treats your network like its own. Get that right, and your team can stop managing freight and start managing the business.
If you’re comparing providers, start with our six questions for evaluating a 3PL. If you’d rather see what a shipper-built 3PL finds in your lanes, contact us to learn more and bring a lane list. We’ll start with the trucks leaving your customers’ docks empty.
Network Optimization and Backhaul FAQs
A backhaul is a load that fills a truck’s return trip after it delivers. Without it, the carrier drives back empty and builds those miles into the outbound rate. ATRI’s 2025 benchmark put non-tank deadhead at 16.5% of miles, so filling the trip home is a direct way to lower a lane’s cost.