The Pallet Factory is a pallet manufacturing and recycling company, and transportation solutions provider.

Premier Business Partners:

Viking Engineering & Development Inc. Kilgore Saw

Businesses that coordinate the shipping and handling of materials require innovative packaging and shipping services to distribute their manufactured goods efficiently and effectively. In many cases, manufacturers call on third-party consultants and vendors to provide these various services.      

By truly understanding the shipping requirements of its manufacturing clients, The Pallet Factory has gained new market share through added services and by producing quality products, President Mike Doyle says. The Memphis, Tenn.-based firm provides transport packaging products and services with a focus on wood pallets and containers and heat-treated products.       

The Pallet Factory has been providing wood pallets, wood packaging and industrial packaging products since 1977, when Doyle founded the business. Through the years, The Pallet Factory’s business evolved its services and product line, as well as its geographic reach. “In the business I had in the foodservice industry, I kept seeing these mountains of pallets that people were having problems with figuring out what to do with, so I just put two and two together and I found a way to pick up some of the excess pallets, repair them and sell them,” Doyle recalls. “One thing led to another and the company just sort of evolved into pallet recycling, manufacturing and management.”   

By the mid-1980s, the company had added a facility in Nashville, Tenn., and Lexington, Ky., and today is a pallet manufacturing company and transportation solutions provider. The Pallet Factory operates a fleet of tractors and more than 400 trailers with a network of transportation companies delivering throughout the Midsouth.

The Pallet Factory services a 200-mile radius around each of its facilities, including the following states: Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and Georgia. On a weekly basis, The Pallet Factory receives approximately 150,000 pallets and typically repairs more than 120,000 of them. These pallets are recycled back into the marketplace to be reused.    

Additionally, more than 20,000 pallets are disassembled by machinery to reuse the various components, and 40,000 new pallets are manufactured weekly.   

Today, its wooden pallets are used in almost every commercial sector, including manufacturing, healthcare, utilities/telecommunications, transportation and foodservices.       

According to the American Wood Pallet Manufacturers Association, there are 1.2 billion pallets in circulation in the United States each day, 93 percent of which are wood. Wood pallets dominate the market because they are a cost-effective, safe and en­vironmentally sustainable product.  The Pallet Factory’s pallets and containers can be customized to accommodate specialized loads. Pallets are constructed with reclaimed softwood lumber such as pine, fir and spruce, as well as hardwood such as oak, elm and beech.

Automated Solutions
Using the Pallet Design System (PDS) – a computer-aided design tool – the company can custom-design pallets at a low cost. PDS is used to analyze or design wood pallets. By analyzing the customer’s operations and use of the pallet, the firm can design a pallet to meet specific load-carrying capacities of the top or bottom deck or in a racked environment.    

Pallets are manufactured at the company’s state-of-the-art, 40,000-square foot facility in Memphis using highly automated equipment, including Machine Specialists Inc. (MSI) for recycling pallets and Viking Engineering equipment for new pallet manufacturing.    

“I personally believe in automation,” Doyle notes. “I think the more automated our company is, the better off we are, and the more we can be a low-cost producer.”   

Doyle says the MSI de-stacker is the cornerstone of the automated sort-and-repair systems. This ma­chine can take entire stacks of either sorted or unsorted pallets and distribute them onto a conveyor for further processing. Several of these machines exist within its manufacturing facilities.   

Pallets are repaired using an MSI automated sort and repair system that operates in an assembly line fashion. Unrepaired pallets are placed on the conveyor at the beginning of the line and end up stacked and repaired by the time they go through the system. These machines can sort in excess of 15,000 pallets per day. Because The Pallet Factory deals with such huge volumes, it is imperative that they are sorted efficiently and effectively.    

In addition, heat treating is becoming an increasing concern among companies shipping products on wooden pallets. The changes in the European Union Measures are just the beginning of regulatory changes that will affect every company shipping products on wooden pallets, the company says. The company has be­come a leader by addressing these types of issues early in their developmental stages.   

In 2003, the Pallet Factory installed a high production heat treating kiln specifically designed for wooden pallets. This heat treating procedure is approved for all existing regulations and will be approved for future regulations as well.

Responsible Player
Recycling all possible material is a primary goal at The Pallet Factory. Unusable pallets enter the facilities on a daily basis. Instead of disposing of these pallets, it uses a MSI wood recovery system to dismantle the pallets and turn the lumber into reusable material. Large quantities of pallets are produced new with its Viking automatic nailing machines, while smaller, custom orders are produced manually with hand-held nail guns. Recycled pallets make up roughly 60 percent of the firm’s business, while new pallets make up 40 percent.   

In addition, Doyle created a pallet management service within the company. This system can produce itemized monthly reports, which include pallet bank balance, total pallets re­ceived and total pallets shipped.