A power transformer failure shut down electricity across the town of Malad recently, threatening thousands of dollars in losses at Broulim’s grocery store after the outage knocked out all refrigeration.
Without power, the store faced the prospect of losing its perishable and frozen inventory. Broulim’s immediately contacted Associated Food Stores for help, asking whether a refrigerated trailer could be delivered to temporarily store product until electricity was restored.
AFS teams from customer service, dispatch and transportation worked quickly to find a solution. They identified a driver returning to Farr West with an empty trailer and rerouted the driver to Malad, where the trailer was dropped at the store to safeguard the inventory.
“The timing couldn’t have been better,” said Duwayne Warren, customer service manager at AFS. “We were fortunate. When the Broulim’s team called, we had a driver coming back from Montana who was just about 30 minutes out of Malad. That allowed us to get a trailer there quickly and protect their product.”
Key AFS team members involved included Virginia Ladeau, Kaela Herrera, Andrew Wicheath, Val Bradley and Duwayne. Crews coordinated directly with the driver and store staff to position the trailer, load perishable and frozen items and later move trailers as power was restored so the store could unload product and reopen.
Duwayne said the fast response prevented significant financial and operational impacts for the store.
“If we hadn’t been able to provide trailers while the power was out, the store would have lost thousands of dollars,” he said. “The waste and cleanup would have been huge, and they would have been out of business on perishable and frozen items until replacement orders could be put together.”
Power was later restored in Malad, allowing Broulim’s to return product to refrigeration and resume normal operations.