The Red Bull business in 17 counties in North and South Carolina have the attention of Gavin Hay, founder and president of Hay Distributing, Inc., a dedicated Red Bull distributor in Charlotte, N.C., and Greenville, S.C.

Within that territory, Hay and his 50 full-time employees service 30 routes with a fleet of 25 trucks delivering the full Red Bull range. He is acutely aware of the growth in Red Bull’s popularity and product mix. When he started his business in 2001, he delivered the one-and-only Red Bull Energy Drink in a 1-ton Chevrolet van – “because that’s all we needed,” Hay saaid. “We hauled 50 cases and some point-of-sale material, and we just went out and got it done.” Before too long, the Chevrolet Van “became obsolete.”

In fact, the prolific growth of the Red Bull franchise is even starting to push the limits of the familiar blue-silver four-bay mini-bodies. The SKU expansion combined with the aging of his fleet had Hay staring at a sizeable investment in new equipment. Instead of stretching his finances, he decided to stretch some of his four-bay bodies into full-fledged six-bay units, for about half the cost of new. The idea came to light after a series of conversations with Kyle McLaughlin, national accounts manager for Mickey’s Reconditioning/Service Team.

“I purchased the four-bays in a 14-16 month period, so our fleet is aging rapidly at the same time, and that can be a financial burden,” Hay explained. “You don’t want to replace them all at once and start that cycle  over again.” The six-bay body “really makes sense,” according to Hay, because the half-width bays on the former four-bay units are full bays on the retrofitted equipment.

“Truth is, we never could make use of those half bays on the back for point-of-sale materials because we’re trying to get as much product as we can on the trucks. We needed the capacity,” he said. “We could have bought new bodies to go along with the new, longer chassis, but the Mickey bodies are built so well that we didn’t need to. Kyle and I looked at this from every different angle – costs, configuration, capacity, life span. We also brought in the Mickey engineers, and we all agreed it made sense to do the work, especially since the units were due for a basic reconditioning anyway. We took good care of these trucks to begin with, so we knew they had more in the tank.”

Besides the added capacity, Hay says the six-bay bodies are “much easier” to work from with hand trucks and forklifts. “With as many SKUs as we carry now, we are always looking at ways to make the driver’s job easier. They’re the most important part of the process and are the face of Red Bull in our markets. I can tell you our four-bay drivers envy the drivers who have the six-bay trucks, and it has nothing to do with the new chassis. It’s just that they are so much easier to work from. Everybody is just chomping at the bit to get one.”

The Charlotte distributor so far has stretched two of the four Mickey four-bay units it purchased at an auction in Texas several years ago. (The rest of the fleet was purchased through Red Bull’s corporate program and are not Mickey units.) There are five more units in the works, and Hay’s plan is to convert all of the four-bays at a rate of one per quarter over the next two years.

“After we finished stretching the four Mickey units, the question was whether Mickey would want to refurbish a competitor’s body. Of course they were eager to do it,” Hay said.

By Mickey Truck Bodies