Freight Cost Per Unit / Cost Per Case

Freight cost per unit breaks total transportation spend down to the individual product level – cost per case, cost per pound, cost per pallet, or cost per eaches. For CPG and food & beverage shippers, this metric is essential because it connects freight cost directly to product margins and landed cost calculations. A logistics team might know they spent $50,000 on freight last month, but finance and sales need to know that it cost $1.42 per case to ship SKU A and $2.18 per case to ship SKU B.

Calculating cost per unit requires allocating shipment-level freight charges down to the order and product level. This gets complicated quickly when multiple orders from multiple customers ship on the same truck – which is exactly what load consolidation is designed to do. The allocation methodology matters: do you split by weight, by pallet positions, by cube, or by revenue? Different methods produce different per-unit costs, and the choice should reflect how freight cost actually scales in your operation.

This metric drives real business decisions. Product profitability analysis, customer pricing, minimum order quantities, and network design all depend on understanding transportation cost at the unit level. A product that looks profitable at the gross margin line might be underwater once you allocate the true freight cost – especially for heavy, low-margin products shipping long distances. Shippers who can see cost per unit by lane, carrier, and customer are better equipped to make pricing, sourcing, and fulfillment decisions that protect margins.

The challenge for most mid-market shippers is that this data lives in multiple systems – the TMS, the ERP, the invoicing system – and stitching it together for accurate per-unit cost analysis is a manual, spreadsheet-heavy exercise.