Welcome to this week’s Supply Chain Radar, where Bay Area milestones meet tariff shake-ups, bond crackdowns, bankruptcies, and a few security concerns worth your attention. ✈️📉🔒
Tariffs on beef, coffee, and 100+ food items were rolled back as the White House pivots toward affordability. FMCSA’s 2026 bond enforcement countdown is officially on, tightening the screws on brokers already battling thin margins. Freight tech saw another shake-up as VC-backed Zuum filed for Chapter 11, while a botched federal raid on a Hyundai battery plant prompted an unusual White House apology.
👉 Scroll on for the week’s biggest shifts, risks, and ripple effects across global logistics.
SCR Number of the Week: 45 years
Dimerco just marked 45 years in the Bay Area with the grand opening of its new 42,000-sq-ft customs-bonded facility near SFO, purpose-built for the semiconductor, AI hardware, and high-tech manufacturing boom. The celebration brought together global logistics pros and highlighted Dimerco’s growing role as a top Asia-Pacific gateway. Faster clearance, tighter control, and true next-flight capability all take center stage.
Make Manifest Work for You, Not the Other Way Around 🎰🚀
Manifest 2026 is 76 days away, and with thousands of vendors fighting for attention, standing out will be the real win. As the event’s official media partner, Pesti helps you cut through the noise with targeted PR, social, video, and design support built for real ROI—not “200 scans” energy.
If your work touches customs, cargo, or documentation, here’s a resource worth bookmarking. We came across a Customs Clearance Key Documents Cheat Sheet, a visual guide covering 36 of the most common forms used across global trade. Even better, its creator has opened up their full library for Black Friday, including tools on logistics, trade finance, and supply-chain workflows.
President Trump has started unwinding his hardline “reciprocal” tariffs, cutting duties on beef, coffee and 100+ food items in a bid to tackle voter anger over the cost of living. The move marks a sharp shift from the no-exemptions stance earlier this year and quietly concedes what economists argued all along: tariffs raised prices at the checkout.
Freight brokers hoping for a clean slate in 2026 are staring down a tougher reality. On January 16, FMCSA’s long-delayed financial responsibility rules go fully live, turning the $75,000 bond from a formality into a hard, enforced minimum. Dip below it and brokers now face automatic suspension within seven days.
With margins already crushed by low contract rates and rising carrier costs, debt-heavy and mid-market brokers could see real pressure, especially those relying on BMC-85 trusts that no longer qualify. Carriers will benefit from stronger protections, but a wave of broker suspensions could reshape routing guides and accelerate consolidation.
Hyundai CEO José Muñoz says the White House personally apologized after a sweeping immigration raid at a Georgia battery plant wrongly detained more than 300 South Korean workers with valid visas. Georgia’s governor also distanced the state from the operation, which has strained U.S.–Korea relations and triggered a class-action lawsuit alleging illegal detention and unsanitary conditions. Some workers have since had their visas reissued.
We still hear it all the time: “My shippers hate automation.” But on The Freight Show, AVRL’s Chadd Olesen made it clear that enterprise shippers are already far ahead. Kimberly-Clark, Best Buy, LG, and Kraft won’t work with brokers who can’t automate bidding, and some don’t even use load boards anymore.
From raw materials to finished goods, global trade runs on six core transportation modes—each bringing distinct strengths to speed, cost, and connectivity. Air moves urgent, high-value cargo; rail handles bulk over long distances with low emissions; road delivers flexible, door-to-door service; water remains the most economical for massive volumes; pipelines keep energy flowing safely; and standardized containers tie everything together across modes.
Freight tech startup Zuum, known for its TMS and “Logistics Super Platform,” has filed for Chapter 11 in California, listing $10–$50M in assets and liabilities. Its top 20 unsecured creditors are almost entirely brokers, some owed more than $300K, highlighting just how strained cash flow had become.
The filing lands amid a two-week stretch of mostly small-carrier bankruptcies, signaling pressure across both tech and trucking segments.
Here’s the scoop on the SCR Egg-O-Meter: It’s a brand-new rating tool that checks out what the media said about business and supply chain execs in the past 30 days and scores them based on the tonality of mentions from a natural language processing algorithm.
The “Egg-o-Meter” is like a quirky kitchen gadget for measuring how well a supply chain leader can cook up success. It cracks open key traits—like adaptability, collaboration, and innovation—and scrambles them into a perfect leadership recipe. The goal? To avoid being a hard-boiled traditionalist or a runny risk-taker. It’s all about being the ideal sunny-side-up mix to lead teams through the ever-changing heat of the supply chain kitchen! 🍳📦
Few leaders are reshaping retail logistics as aggressively, or as thoughtfully, as Indira Uppuluri, SVP of Supply Chain Technology at Walmart. Under her guidance, Walmart is building one of the world’s most intelligent and adaptive supply chains, where AI is embedded end-to-end to improve forecasting, inventory accuracy, logistics resilience, and associate productivity.
Uppuluri describes Walmart’s network as “people-led and tech-powered,” an approach reflected in the company’s rapid adoption of agentic AI, machine learning, robotics, and computer vision. Walmart’s proprietary multi-horizon recurrent neural network now predicts demand across multiple time windows, accounting for weather, global trends, events, and shifting behaviors. The result: smarter inventory placement, reduced safety stock, better import timing, and fewer stockouts.
Inside distribution centers, Walmart’s AI-powered robotics break down and rebuild pallets, while generative AI tools route the right associates to fix disruptions — whether it’s a damaged pallet, a late inbound truck, or an automation alert. Computer vision supports real-time quality checks, spotting everything from a bruised tomato to an expired label.
Walmart’s digital twin serves as a simulation engine, allowing teams to evaluate tradeoffs, test “what-if” scenarios, and stress-test decisions before rolling them out. And on the roads, adaptive routing algorithms maximize truck fill rates and dynamically shift deliveries to the fastest, most efficient node — even adjusting port strategies during storms or canal delays.
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