At 48forty, our team of supply chain experts keep up with dynamic market changes so you don’t have to. Hear more about what factors are impacting the pallet market right now, and how 48forty is helping to keep our customers in supply.
Marcus Blood is the Regional Director for Supply Chain in the West, and has been with 48forty for almost 14 years. He’s managed one of our plants as well as worked within the supply chain in our brokerage group.
The supply chain continues to make headlines.
Pallets may have never really had the attention that they have before, because they’ve kind of just always been there and nobody thinks much about them. But I think everything in the supply chain, whether it’s a pallet, whether it’s corrugate, whether it’s the truck that hauls it down the road, those resources have all been tight for the last two years. And not only are people starting to realize the need that they may have taken for granted prior, but they’re trying to find better ways to utilize the resources that we have and make them go further. And that's our business.
What’s impacting the pallet market right now?
We still don’t have the inventories we would expect to see in a normal year in January and February, where quite honestly, trends are typically through most of the country, to build up recycled inventory in the first quarter of a year, until produce seasons start to pick back up, and put demand back on that. That carries them again through the holiday season. So this movement on lumber is going to affect availability. It’s going to put some demand back on recycled that is maybe not necessarily normal recycle demand, just simply because new lumber is going to be hard to source. That’s going to keep likely inventories tight.
What is 48forty doing to keep our customers in supply?
We’ve had to think outside the box. We’ve had to figure out things differently. We’re seeing unprecedented things, not just from pandemic, but in our industry. We’ve had customers that have been willing to look at pallet options that five years ago, they probably would have never talked to us about. I think that’s the positive in all this, is we’re coming back to people thinking outside the box, people stepping back and looking at how things that we’ve done out of habit for years and years can be changed and the habits can become better, can become more efficient.
