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Food Movers: The Pallet Puzzle

Food Movers: The Pallet Puzzle

by | Jan 8, 2016 | Food Movers, Issue 1, Stories

One hundred years ago, on any dock, you could find longshoremen with sore muscles and calloused hands. Many of them would have spent days unloading each parcel by hand from the hull of a ship. Think “On the Waterfront,” but in color.

With the introduction of the pallet in the early 20th century, and with its wider use after World War II, what would have taken hours or even days with break bulk shipping — where each item is individually unloaded by hand — took a fraction of the time, allowing more goods to be moved more efficiently.

Pallets are platforms, moveable beds of sorts, for just about anything you’d want to ship. Key to their design is the ability of a forklift to pick up the pallet and whatever is sleeping on top of it and put it onto a train, truck, ship or airplane, or move it around a warehouse.

Today, more than 450 million pallets are manufactured each year. In the United States, 2 billion pallets pulse through the channels of the national supply chain — just like platelets through the human bloodstream — carrying vital cargo, often with little recognition of the role they play globally.

Pallets are so integral to the supply chain that they are subject to scrutiny in labs such as one at Virginia Tech, where researchers use stress machines and extreme conditions to test durability.

John Clarke spent 11 years at the Pallet Lab and now serves on its advisory board. He is also technical director at Nelson Company — a manufacturer and supplier of pallets. When it comes to materials, Clarke explains that while some industries favor plastic, steel or cardboard pallets, wooden pallets still dominate.

Ninety to 95 percent of U.S. pallets are made of wood, but even though wood offers affordability and reliability, the porous material risks bringing more than just cargo to its destination. Mold, bacteria and pests can quickly contaminate an already perilous food supply chain. To protect cargo, wood pallets must be sterilized by being heated to 133 degrees Fahrenheit.

“There aren’t many things as old as the pallet that are still made out of the same material as they were originally,” Clarke remarks. “That’s because wood is a very balanced material.” It’s stiff yet strong, cheap yet durable.

Although the 48-by-40-inch pallet is known as the “grocery pallet” for its common use in the food industry and beyond, there is no universal pallet size. Even grocery pallet dimensions are standardized only in the United States. Of the billions of pallets used in the world, there are thousands of sizes, materials and designs.

Some companies don’t own pallets at all. They rent them, creating “pools” of pallets. PECO and CHEP are two major pallet rental companies that appeared on the U.S. shipping logistics scene in the 1990s. As retail chains like Walmart and Costco gained more clout, they began mandating that products from manufacturers arrive on pallets instead of by clamp truck or in smaller loads. PECO and CHEP offered rental pallet services that would save manufacturers that had never used pallets the expense of buying, repairing and retrieving their own pallets.

Although it makes sense for some companies to own their own pallets and use them multiple times, Clarke says that many pallets are never returned to their owners. “You might have a custom pallet, but because of the weight and fuel costs, it’s just not economical to have it returned for ten dollars when you could replace it for five.”

As soon as a company finds a pallet strategy that works, changes in fuel or lumber costs can force another shift in the pallet puzzle.

In high-volume supply chains, all of this fuss over design, calculation and recalculation at the margin matters — especially for time-sensitive, perishable commodities like food. In 2010, Costco decided it would only accept block pallets, with forklift openings on all four sides instead of only two, in the case of skids. This eliminated the need to rotate the pallets if the side without openings was facing the forklift. If Costco unloads millions of pallets a year and saves just two seconds per pallet not having to rotate it, they will have saved hundreds of hours per year.

Pallets remain useful even after their days in the transportation system end. They might pile up outside a grocery store or end up at a special recycling or mulch grinding facility. Thanks to Pinterest, they might get upcycled into a photo frame or coffee table. Useful again, but this time, in full view.

Stringer pallets (above) have two opening points for the forks of a forklift, while a block pallet (top) has four, one for each side. While stringer pallets are less expensive, a block pallet saves time because a forklift or pallet jack doesn’t have to rotate the pallet in order to lift it. Click each image to enlarge.

Lexicon Icon

PALLET JACK

another name for a hand-driven forklift that moves pallets; not unlike a dolly.

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Food Movers: Chasing Maine Lobsters

Food Movers: Chasing Maine Lobsters

by | Jan 8, 2016 | Food Movers, Issue 1, Stories

It is 4:30 this morning, not a streak of light on the horizon in the eastern sky as the first full-throated growls of marine diesels come to life and begin their ghostly procession out into the inky pre-dawn blackness. Their halogen lights cast an eerie loom over their shimmering wakes.

After a long winter, the waters off the Maine coast have warmed to the point that lobsters have begun to crawl toward shore seeking protective shelters. There, they split their shells apart and struggle out of their protective armor, growing to a larger size in the process. Once their new shells have hardened within a few weeks, they are ravenously hungry. Millions of them scavenge along the bottoms of Maine’s intricate geography of bays, reaches, coves and creeks, waving their antennae to pick up scents that lead them to food, which lobstermen are only too happy to provide.

In 2014, Maine lobstermen harvested more than 124 million pounds of lobster worth close to half a billion dollars from Maine’s 5,000 miles of saltwater coastline. It takes the hands of thousands of workers on ships and shores to keep that supply chain moving.

Aboard the lobster boats departing the harbor, a lobsterman’s helper, called a sternman, is busy spearing salted herring from bait totes and stuffing this reeking repast into knitted bait bags. The captain rounds up, heads into the tide and comes alongside the first of the 200 to 300 lobster buoys he will visit today, all painted with his special colors. The captain gaffs the line with a boat hook and takes a wrap or two around the shivs of his hydraulic hauler, which catches the line and spins it into a pile at his feet.

Once the trap comes up over the rail, the sternman takes over. He or she — and there are many sternwomen and an increasing number of female captains — opens the top of the trap and pulls out lobsters and sundry other marine creatures that have crawled or wriggled into the wire enclosure looking for a free meal. The other creatures will go back overboard along with juvenile lobsters that have not reached the minimum or maximum size range that lobstermen are allowed to harvest. The sternman also checks for any eggs carried on a female lobster tail. Egg-bearing females, too, go back into the deep to release their eggs into swirling currents to keep the cycle of life — and Maine’s prodigious lobster economy — going.

Once back at the dock, the day’s catch is swung onto scales and sorted into crates, soon to be loaded into trucks en route to tens of thousands of restaurants, cruise ships and lobster shacks. Clearly, one of America’s few successfully managed fisheries is providing benefits to fishermen and foodies alike.

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Food Movers: Paper or Plastic?

Food Movers: Paper or Plastic?

by | Jan 8, 2016 | Food Movers, Issue 1, Stories

There was a time in our country’s history when farm-to-table wasn’t a trend, it was a necessity — especially when it came to dairy consumption.

If a family wanted milk, that milk came straight from the family’s cow and had to be consumed or turned into butter or cheese on milking day. Otherwise, it would spoil.

As farms and cities got bigger and fewer people kept their own cows, delivering fresh dairy became the milkman’s job. But the new process was far from perfect: Hand-delivered bottles were heavy and needed to be returned and sterilized, and without refrigeration, milk would still go bad within a day. Another problem: Glass jugs break.

Legend holds that the inventor of the paper milk carton we know today dropped a glass jug one morning, sending milk and glass everywhere. In his frustration, John Van Wormer patented a paper milk carton that could be shipped flat and assembled as needed at the dairy. (Until this point, dairies used G.W. Maxwell’s earlier paper milk carton, which did not fold flat.)

Van Wormer’s early Pure-Pak milk cartons, patented in 1915, were made of paperboard and sealed with wax, which prevented the milk from saturating the paperboard. The gable-top closure helped maintain freshness during transport while eliminating the need for a cap. And unlike glass bottles, milk cartons were lightweight and disposable: They could travel farther and didn’t need to come back.

JOHN R. VAN WORMER

Although G.W. Maxwell gets credit for creating the gable-topped milk carton, toy factory owner John Van Wormer invented a carton that could fold flat, a revolutionary efficiency in the milk chain.

Patent drawing for milk container that could fold flat, invented by John R. Van Wormer.

While people had a hard time letting go of their beloved glass bottles, the coated carton slowly gained popularity, and as that transition began taking hold, so did refrigeration. By the late 1940s, electric refrigerators were in most American homes, small family-owned dairies were consolidating and the milkman was securing his Rockwellian role in the lives of American families and neighborhoods that soon became nostalgia.

While neither was necessarily dependent on the other, the milk carton, owes some of its success to advances in cold chain technology — a series of refrigerated tanks, trucks (“reefers”) — and storage units that ensure dairy and other perishables like meat and produce make it from the farm to the grocery store without spoiling.

Today, the value of cold chain markets that support perishable food distribution globally is estimated at around $250 billion. And while many countries lag in their cold chain facility development, the United States annually moves some three billion gallons of chilled milk through a cold chain so efficient that customers can buy refrigerated milk at nearly every gas station and corner store in the country.

As other countries expand their own cold chains, the U.S. cold chain industry stands to profit from rapid growth. According to the Global Cold Chain Alliance, refrigerated warehouse capacity around the world increased by 20 percent from 2012 to 2014, and three of the top five refrigerated warehouse operators are U.S. companies. But most of that milk is no longer being moved in Van Wormer’s carton: The milk carton may have solved the problem of breaking glass, but plastic jugs have overcome some shortcomings of cartons: They are less likely to leak and easier to re-seal.

According to Glen Harrington, director of manufacturing for the Borden Dairy Company, milk manufacturers were beginning to make their own gallon and half-gallon plastic jugs by the 1970s. When produced on a large scale, Harrington says, it’s more cost effective for dairy companies to make cartons in-house than it is to buy them.

Paperboard milk and cream cartons are still in use, but these days, they’re lined with polyethylene, a plastic used for food-safe packaging. In many countries outside the U.S., milk is sold unrefrigerated in shelf-stable cartons, like the ones used stateside for soups and broths. The milk is usually pasteurized at a higher temperature to extend shelf life. The downsides to this type of shelf-stable milk, according to Harrington, are that it typically costs more and doesn’t taste as good.

“We’ve got a good system,” says Harrington. “Why would we spend more to make it taste worse if we could just move it around fresh?”

PLASTIC MILK JUG

The design of plastic milk bottles evolved quickly in the mid-1960s, when the handled jug as we now know it was invented. The design not only saved dairies money, it encouraged customers to buy a gallon of milk at a time, a large amount compared to the smaller quantities sold outside the U.S.

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