Dot Foods Exceeds Safety Targets by 4x

Dot Foods, Inc. carries more than 130,000 products from 1,500 food industry manufacturers, making it the largest food industry less-than-truckload consolidator in North America. Through Dot Transportation, Inc., an affiliate of Dot Foods, the company distributes foodservice, convenience, retail, and vending products to distributors in all 50 states and more than 50 countries. Dot Foods operates 13 U.S. and 2 Canadian distribution centers. Founded in 1960, the company remains a privately held and family run company.

Jeff Barry, Director of Innovation, calls it a family company in the truest sense. Walk into any Dot Foods break room and you'll see employees' personal items left out on tables, unattended. "People really trust each other." That family approach extends directly to how Dot Foods thinks about safety.

Dot Foods had invested seriously in that commitment: behavioral based safety committees, regular audits, and active coaching at every shift level. But with multiple warehouses and thousands of associates across four shifts, even a well-resourced safety team can't be everywhere at once. As Sara Bowen, Assistant Warehouse Safety Manager put it: "When you're looking at all of your areas and all of your warehouses, it can feel like: how do we possibly know where to start?"

Dot Foods expanded their deployment of Protex AI in January 2026. Over the following months, the team established a reliable picture of risk at two new sites, implemented corrective actions, and measured the results.

Protex revealed a gap between the operation Dot Foods believed they were running and the one the cameras were actually capturing. One “aha” moment from Dot Food’s initial deployment stuck with Jeff: pallets arrived stacked up to eight feet tall. Protex AI footage surfaced that operators had taken to climbing on top of other objects to get what they needed.

The response was not discipline. Dot Foods built a platform with railings, designed specifically for the task. This approach informed the rest of the Dot Foods rollout: What changes can be made to help people do their jobs safely and efficiently?

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Similar discoveries followed: associates using phones in areas leadership had assumed were low-risk, near-miss events occurring at frequencies that surprised even experienced safety managers, and close calls during shift transitions that no existing process was capturing. Far from overwhelming them, Protex Intelligence empowered the team, turning them into analysts. By querying which specific risk type, camera, and shift were generating the most risk, they moved from gut feel to a precise call to action. At their hub, that meant uncovering a single area responsible for 90% of weekly events: something that had never appeared on anyone's radar, that they could now act on with precision.

The team also changed how they used data in conversations with employees and shift managers. "We would use the data to engage the team and start a conversation: what are you actually seeing out there? When employees' answers matched what Protex was showing, it gave the safety team the confidence and the direction to act,” said Bowen.

Heatmaps from Protex AI surfaced over-congested areas at the satellite site. Minor layout changes freed up space, and vehicle/vehicle near miss events dropped 33% in the following month. At the hub, targeted pedestrian safety coaching drove a 71% reduction in person/vehicle near-miss events over the same period. “It’s not about discipline; we’ve had a lot of conversations surrounding the behaviors and patterns we’ve noticed. The feedback from the team has been positive,” said Katie Berens, Director of Occupational Health & Safety.

Both sites surpassed the 10% reduction target set at the start of the program: the hub reached 39% and the other distribution center reached 30%. Dot Foods is now expanding to seven additional distribution centers, guided by the same small central safety team that led the first deployment. “We wanted to solidify the program and see what works for our organization before rolling it out to other locations,” said Katie Berens.

For a company built on the idea that everyone goes home safe, the results during the initial site rollouts weren't just a metric. They were proof that a strong safety culture could get even stronger with the right data behind it.

Start with alignment. Dot Foods spent weeks building consistent messaging with their internal branding team. Their standard: no manager or employee should be caught off guard by the rollout, or a question they couldn't answer.

Customize the system to your reality. Dot Foods used Protex AI’s flexible rule engine to adjust speed thresholds, proximity alerts, and zone boundaries based on what their teams knew to be genuinely risky versus operationally unavoidable. Fine-tuning rules produced better data.

‍Find where to focus, then focus there. Rather than broad campaigns across every area, Dot Foods used Protex Intelligence to identify which camera, which rule, and which shift was generating the most risk, and directed their corrective actions there first.

Treat the announcement day as a new baseline. Dot Foods planned to mark the day employees learned about the system as a new benchmark in Protex, expecting another measurable drop in events as awareness spread.

Scale deliberately. Dot Foods is using a consolidated team of safety champions for their organizational rollout. This allows them to learn and replicate what works specifically for their organization.