Food distributor Sysco celebrated the arrival of 10 heavy-duty electric tractors to the fleet at its Houston, operating site, reaching a total of nearly 120 electric vehicles globally.
This addition is a major step toward Sysco’s goal to reduce its direct emissions by 27.5% by 2030. Sysco now has heavy-duty electric tractors in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Sweden, including over 100 U.S.-based vehicles in Houston; Baltimore; Boston; Denver; Long Island, New York; Los Angeles; and Fremont and Riverside, California.
Sysco expects to receive additional EVs by the end of June, bringing the total number of EVs to more than 130.
“We are proud of our progress to scale our electric truck fleet and continue our journey to meet our climate goal,” says Neil Russell, chief administrative officer at Sysco. “This work is important to many of our customers who have also set goals to reduce emissions.
“Electrifying a portion of our fleet will help us reduce our carbon footprint together while reducing noise pollution and improving the day-to-day experience of our delivery partners,” adds Russell. “We’re grateful to the numerous manufacturers, government officials and community partners who collaborated with us to get to this important moment.”
“The scale of our EV deployment today is the result of years of planning and tremendous levels of cross-industry collaboration,” says Dan Purefoy, Sysco’s chief supply chain officer. “I want to thank my team for their expertise and leadership in building our capabilities to deploy this new technology in our operations. We appreciate all the colleagues across Sysco who have been a part of this journey so far, as well as the board and executive team at Sysco for supporting our vision of a lower-carbon fleet.”
With more than 72,000 colleagues, Sysco operates 334 distribution facilities worldwide and serves approximately 725,000 customer locations. For fiscal year 2023 that ended July 1, 2023, the company generated sales of more than $76 billion.