How Northern Wind Improved Shipment Visibility and Accountability with Kargo

What you need to know

• 3x ROI in the first year with Kargo
• $160,000 saved in the first year
• 6,970 shipments tracked in the first year
• 917 damage exceptions captured

The Company

Northern Wind is a trusted mid-sized seafood manufacturer and distributor based in Rhode Island, US.

Northern Wind ships many products, including lobster, scallops, and tuna, through a network of facilities and third-party logistics providers. Customers include major retailers and wholesale grocers like Costco, Albertsons, and BJ’s Wholesale.

Northern Wind works with cold storage and logistics partners in California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, and Rhode Island, as well as international partners.

The Challenge

Northern Wind’s seafood moves through many hands before reaching customers. Products travel from packers in Asia to Northern Wind’s cold storage facility, through 3PL facilities, and ultimately to customers across the US, UK, and Korea.

With so many handoffs, Northern Wind needed traceable evidence of the condition of shipments before they left its facility.

Product information also needs to be accurate. Size and dimension variations drastically affect the pricing of fish and scallops. Pallets of lobster often have multiple date codes, and it is expensive to make an error. A pallet of seafood may contain more than 100 cases, making documentation difficult and time-consuming.

Northern Wind needed a simple way to capture this information without adding operational complexity.

The Solution

In 2025, Kargo placed four Towers at the dock doors of Northern Wind’s New Bedford facility. Northern Wind uses generic barcodes and connects Kargo to its warehouse management system.

Due to the simplicity of the solution, Northern Wind can work with Kargo Towers without any integration.

Every case passes through Kargo Towers, allowing Northern Wind to capture shipment information as products move through the facility.

Northern Wind can use this visual record to investigate exceptions and defend against claims. Shareable evidence is especially valuable when shipments move through third-party logistics providers.

Northern Wind can also use the system to document product information that matters to its customers. For example, date codes on lobster can be consistently captured so the oldest product can be identified and shipped first.

Northern Wind plans to expand Kargo to support additional workflows, including generating Advance Shipping Notices (ASNs) internally between plants and externally for customers. Kargo already generates ASNs for other customers, giving Northern Wind a path to automate this process as customer requirements evolve.

The Result

Kargo gave Northern Wind a simple way to track shipments and document what happened to them across its operations and 3PL network. As a result, Northern Wind saw a 3x ROI in the first year of the four Tower deployment.

Northern Wind tracked 6,970 shipments, captured 917 damage exceptions, and generated $106,000 in savings.

Beyond the direct ROI, Kargo gives Northern Wind stronger evidence when claims arise and a way to hold logistics partners accountable.

As customer requirements evolve, Northern Wind plans to expand Kargo to additional inbound and outbound workflows, including ASN generation between plants and for external customers.