A drayage company built by people who used to be the receiver.
Most drayage carriers were built around the truck. Cate Freight came out of the warehouse and 3PL world. We know what an inbound SOP looks like, what a customs broker needs back, and what a dock manager wishes drayage drivers understood.
What we are
Cate Freight is a Charleston, SC drayage carrier. We move ocean containers between the SCPA terminals — Wando Welch, North Charleston, and Hugh Leatherman — and warehouses, transload yards, and shipper facilities across South Carolina and the Southeast.
That's the entire business. We don't run truckload freight elsewhere. We don't broker flatbed. We don't dabble in air or international. Drayage is the only thing we do, and it's the only thing we want to do.
What we are not
We are not a 700-truck mega-carrier. We're not a national 3PL. We don't have a fancy customer portal or a name partner on the building. What we have is operational discipline, a Charleston address, and a phone someone actually answers.
Why we started this
Greg Cate spent years running warehouses and 3PL operations on the receiver side of Charleston imports. The pattern was the same week after week: brilliant freight forwarders and customs brokers, doing real work, getting torpedoed by drayage carriers who didn't check releases, didn't return calls, and didn't get PODs back without three follow-ups.
The opportunity was obvious. Build a drayage operation that runs the way receivers wish it would — releases verified before dispatch, paperwork clean and named correctly, communication that doesn't go silent the moment a problem shows up. That's Cate Freight.
How we run
Our operation is intentionally simple:
- One dispatcher per file — the person who quoted runs the whole move
- Releases (customs, freight, line) verified before any truck moves
- Daily morning ETA updates to the receiver on in-flight containers
- Same-day POD imaging with files named to your reference
- Clean accessorials — quoted up front, no surprise lines
- Equipment match: tri-axle, genset, flat-rack scheduled in advance, not at the gate
Where we operate
Cate Freight is based in Charleston, SC. We pull from all three SCPA container terminals every shift and run regional drays into the rest of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Most of our work is local Charleston drayage; a meaningful share is regional Southeast lanes. See the coverage page for specifics.
Who we work with
We work with 3PLs, freight forwarders, customs brokers, and direct importers and exporters. The common thread isn't the org chart — it's that they care about how the move runs, not just the rate. If you've ever tracked down a dispatcher to find your container or argued with a carrier about an accessorial you didn't see coming, you'll like working with us.
Get in touch
Email greg@catefreight.com or call dispatch at (843) 998-7820. The fastest way to a quote is the quote form.