Ten years ago this month, we took delivery of the first trailer of Gaylord boxes the company would ever handle. It was 53 feet long, loaded with empties from a food co-packer in Caledonia, and we had no idea what we were doing.
The story
It was December 2014. The co-packer had a backlog of empty Gaylord boxes piling up in their warehouse and a Monday-morning deadline to get the floor clear before a contracted retail audit. They had called every disposal vendor in southeast Wisconsin and none of them would commit to a Saturday pickup. Someone in their plant knew someone who knew someone, and we got the call on Friday morning.
We rented a forklift. We drove to Caledonia. We loaded the boxes into a 53-foot trailer we had also rented. We hauled them back to a rented bay off South 10th Street. And we spent the next two days sorting them by hand, hauling them around, and figuring out which ones were good enough to sell to a contract assembler in Kenosha that had said they would take them at $1.75 each if the load was clean.
The Kenosha sale paid for the trailer rental, the forklift rental, the bay rental for the next six months, and a sandwich each for the four people who had helped out that weekend.
What it taught us
Three things. First, the packaging waste market was much bigger than we had assumed. Within a month we had heard from five other plants in the area with similar disposal problems. Second, the per-box economics worked at lower volumes than we expected — a sub-thousand-box load could still cover its own freight and inspection costs. Third, customer relationships in this business are about reliability. We were not the fastest or the cheapest, but we showed up on a Saturday, and the co-packer kept calling us for the next three years.
What has changed
Almost everything operationally. We have a yard now. We have a baler, two forklifts of our own, a dock team, and a process. We do not rent things.
What has not changed
The basic conviction. Most used Gaylord boxes are perfectly good for another two, three, five trips. The waste in the system is real and big and unnecessary. Showing up matters. Doing the unsexy operational work well matters more than telling a clever story about it.
Ten years. Forty-some-odd employees who have worked the floor in that time. Around four hundred thousand boxes through the door. Zero corrugate sent to landfill since 2021. We are not done.