There is a category of business whose product is showing up far from town. Propane dealers running bobtails to farmhouse tanks. Water haulers filling cisterns. Feed stores delivering to hobby farms. Home-heating oil dealers on winter routes. The service is the trip, the customers are spread across counties, and the truck's diesel is the cost of goods sold in everything but name.
These businesses carry a specific irony: several of them sell fuel or energy themselves, priced to customers ahead of the season, while buying their own truck diesel at whatever the pump says day to day. A propane dealer who offers customers a fixed seasonal rate has done for their customers exactly what nobody has done for the dealer's own trucks. The delivery fleet's fuel floats through the same winter the customer's price was locked for.
A locked maximum for the trucks that do the delivering
FuelAnchor is a fuel supply company, and to be precise about the fit: it caps the price of the fuel your trucks burn, purchased through stations, which for a rural route business is the diesel and gasoline in the delivery vehicles themselves. You request a quote for the gallons your fleet uses each month, and it returns a locked maximum price per gallon for your term of 1, 3, 6, or 12 months. You prepay the gallons, then drivers fill with a FuelAnchor card at the stations you choose, which matters doubly in rural territory where the stations that exist are simply the stations there are. Below your locked maximum, you pay the pump price. Above it, your rate holds.
The route math makes the case. Rural delivery means high miles per stop by definition, so per gallon costs pass through to per delivery costs faster than in any dense-route business. When diesel rises, the margin on every far-flung customer thins first, and the farthest customers, the ones a service business least wants to start surcharging or dropping, thin fastest. Capping the fuel keeps the whole map servable at the economics you planned.
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Seasonal peaks and year-round routes
Many rural route businesses are winter-weighted: propane and heating oil deliveries surge exactly when driving conditions are worst and consumption per route is highest. A 3 or 6 month agreement quoted in the fall puts a ceiling under the heating season, sized from last winter's fuel records rather than a gentle summer month. Businesses with flat year-round routes, like feed and farm-supply delivery, fit a 12 month agreement that carries one number across the whole calendar. And a 1 month agreement can cover a specific surge, like a harvest-season hauling contract taken on top of normal routes.
Diesel bobtails and gasoline pickups are quoted independently in the same request, each fuel getting its own real figure. There is no rate card: every quote is computed when you ask, from current prices in your service territory, your volumes, and your term. Request a quote with a gallons figure from your own records, and give the trucks the same deal you give your customers: a price that holds for the season, no matter what the winter does.
🔒 Your information is never shared.
This form saves your progress automatically as you go.