Bay Harbor Freight Systems Keeps Green Bay's Supply Chains Moving

The dispatch office at Bay Harbor Freight Systems sits within sight of the Fox River, close enough that Desmond Halvorsen can watch cargo vessels move toward the Port of Green Bay from his desk. That proximity is not incidental. Halvorsen has spent the better part of fifteen years building his company around the idea that Green Bay's often-overlooked port and rail connections make it one of the more strategically positioned logistics hubs on the Great Lakes, even if the city rarely gets credit for it outside freight circles.

Halvorsen took over what was then a six-truck hauling company from his father in 2009, during a recession that had already cut the fleet down from a peak of eleven trucks. Rather than simply weathering the downturn, he used the slow years to study the freight patterns moving through the port, noticing that many regional manufacturers were paying premium rates to route goods through Chicago-based logistics providers who had little familiarity with northeastern Wisconsin's roads, seasonal weather patterns, or manufacturing base. He believed a locally rooted company could compete on service even without matching a national carrier's scale.

From Six Trucks to a Regional Network

Bay Harbor Freight Systems today operates a fleet of more than 80 trucks, a 140,000-square-foot warehousing facility near the port, and a growing brokerage arm that coordinates shipments for clients who don't own their own trucks. The company's core business remains moving paper products, packaged foods, and manufactured goods between Green Bay-area producers and distribution centers across the Midwest, but Halvorsen has steadily added intermodal rail coordination and cold-storage warehousing to the business over the past decade.

The expansion into cold storage came directly from client demand. A mid-sized food producer that had long used Bay Harbor for dry freight approached Halvorsen in 2017 asking whether the company could also handle refrigerated storage and shipping, since its existing cold-chain logistics provider was based three hours away. Halvorsen financed a refrigerated warehouse addition through a combination of bank financing and a state economic development loan, and the facility now serves as a hub for several Fox Valley food and dairy companies.

Navigating a Volatile Freight Market

Halvorsen has been candid about the difficulty of running a trucking company through years of swinging freight rates, driver shortages, and rising fuel and insurance costs. He built an in-house driver training and retention program after watching turnover erode service quality across the industry, offering signing bonuses funded not by outside capital but by trimming administrative overhead. Driver retention at Bay Harbor now runs meaningfully above the national trucking industry average, according to figures Halvorsen has shared at regional logistics conferences.

Investing in Green Bay's Infrastructure Case

Beyond his own company, Halvorsen has become one of the more persistent voices lobbying state and local officials to invest further in the Port of Green Bay's infrastructure, arguing that deeper channel dredging and expanded rail spurs would let more Wisconsin manufacturers ship directly rather than trucking goods to Milwaukee or Chicago first. He serves on a regional transportation advisory board and has testified before a state legislative committee on freight infrastructure funding.

A Family Business Adjusting to Scale

Even as Bay Harbor has grown well beyond the company his father built, Halvorsen has tried to preserve its family-business character, still personally reviewing new client contracts and keeping an open-door policy with drivers that some larger carriers have abandoned. His oldest son recently joined the company's operations team after finishing a supply chain management degree, and Halvorsen said succession planning, while not urgent, is "something I think about every time I watch a ship come through the harbor."