Loblaw

Loblaw Companies Ltd. is changing how groceries reach Canadian store shelves, one battery-powered tractor-trailer at a time.

The key, says Daniel Truong, a senior analyst with Loblaw, has been to stop asking whether an electric truck can do everything a diesel truck does, and to look instead for the work it already does best.

“What kind of job do we have today that is the best use case for these electric trucks? And we found a lot of lanes, a lot of routes that the electric truck actually performs extremely well in,” Truong said during an Electric Autonomy panel discussion on fleet electrification.

Headquartered in Brampton, Ont., Loblaw is Canada’s largest food and pharmacy retailer, operating Loblaws, No Frills, Provigo, Maxi and Shoppers Drug Mart stores.

Staggered charging

The company now runs 27 zero-emission vehicles in a fleet of about 1,100. Its first Freightliner eCascadia went into regular service in spring 2023, hauling goods from its distribution centre in Boucherville, Que., to the Greater Montreal Area. Ten more eCascadias joined the fleet in Vancouver in early 2024. Loblaw also uses electric yard trucks at distribution centres nationwide.

The trucks run hub-and-spoke routes, always returning to base to charge. Drivers start as early as 4 a.m., with departures staggered until about 10 a.m. “so that we’re not overloading the grid at one specific time,” Truong said. After a 10- to 12-hour shift, trucks return for a charge of about two hours before a second shift heads out. They come back between 7 p.m. and midnight, and most charging happens overnight.

In summer, the trucks get 300 to 350 kilometres on a charge, Truong said. Loblaw builds in a buffer of at least 10 to 15 per cent state of charge, and trucks have not come back lower than that. A typical truck covers up to 300 kilometres in a 12-hour shift, including runs such as Montreal to Cornwall, Ont., and back.

Loblaw pairs every truck with its own charger. Its Boucherville site has up to 20 trucks and its British Columbia operation about 10, “and potentially growing,” Truong said, with a matching number of plugs.

“Given our operation, how heavily dependent we are on uptime and performance and our commitment to on-time arrivals, we made sure that there are more than enough,” he said.

Lowering costs

The biggest payoff in electrification is the reduction in expenses. Truong put the fuel savings at seven to eight times compared with diesel, or up to 80 per cent, depending on electricity rates and the price of diesel.

Incentives have helped Loblaw in the past, but they are not always reliable. Truong said the abrupt suspension of Quebec’s Écocamionnage program in 2024 “definitely put a pause on where we wanted to go” on future purchases. The Quebec program returned last year, while B.C. also reinstated MHDV incentives earlier this year with its CleanBC Go Electric Rebates.

Truong said fleets are sending “a strong demand signal” that Ottawa should bring back its incentive for medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission vehicles.

Loblaw started by training its most receptive and senior drivers, Truong said, acknowledging “quite the learning curve” that comes with any change. He said the trucks are smooth, quiet and have strong torque, and drivers are “responding incredibly well.”

Truong expects more public charging along highway corridors and longer-range batteries to open new routes, such as Montreal to Quebec City or B.C.’s Coquihalla Highway, that diesel trucks handle today.

“I think having more optionality is where the technology is heading towards,” he said, adding that trucks will only get more efficient and less expensive.

The company aims to move its short-haul day-cab trucks to zero tailpipe emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its operations by 2040. Its 2025 ESG report says direct and energy-related emissions are down 16 per cent from 2020.