Berry Pallets

Six semi loads of lumber a day.

 

Berry Pallets, located at the far southern end of Fourth Street Southwest in Waseca since 2012, builds a million pallets a year and has numerous international connections. The company, owned and operated by Richard Berry and his son Curtis, “shops” for lumber in U.S., Canadian and even Brazilian markets. Its plant builds one line of  pallets to specifications which allow them to be shipped anywhere in the world.

 

“If it’s a type of pallet, we can build it,” says Richard. The company website states pallets can be as small as 24 inches square, or as long as 8 feet.

 

Berry Pallets has about 70 employees who do their work assisted by dozens of different machines, ranging from handheld nail guns to one about 100 feet long which scans the quality of a piece of wood, assesses how it can best be used, and then saws it appropriately–within seconds.

 

“These days they make some very sophisticated machines with precise measuring abilities,” observes Richard. “They can really help speed up production.”

 

A walk through the company’s 76,000 square foot construction area takes visitors from one type of surprise to another, presenting speeds, scales, and systems which inspire both awe and curiosity. One question which introduces itself is where so many pallets are used.

 

Richard explains the bulk of the company’s customers are food producers and distributors located within about 250 miles–an area defined by Sioux Falls on the west, Des Moines to the south, Madison Wisconsin to the east and the Twin Cities to the north, according to the company website.

 

There are numerous reasons, Richard says, why so many pallets are needed. For one, he says, “merchandise moves on pallets.” Thanks to the many times a pallet full of product might be picked up and put down–from the production floor to storage, from storage to a loading dock, from a loading dock onto a truck, followed by mirror image steps at the other end–pallets often don’t last very long, especially since they are carrying a lot of weight and being manipulated by forklifts.

 

Along with that, food producers and distributors must follow strict quality control and cleanliness standards. If some type of loose powder or spilled liquid contaminates the wood of a pallet, food handlers don’t want to risk any type of crossover between products, and so remove the pallet from use.

 

Richard feels his point is well illustrated by the motto of Woodpack Global, a national organization of companies like his: “Pallets move the world.”

 

Thanks to upgrades and expansions over the past decade or so, the Berry Pallets building might send the impression the business is fairly new, but in fact it’s been part of the county’s economy since Richard started a hobby business in his garage in 1989.

 

He claims that, having grown up on a dairy farm, working was the only way he could think of to spend his time. So along with a full time job at Cargill in Mankato, he began a hobby business of cutting up and selling firewood. It quickly became a pattern that, when he would ask for an old pallet or two as scrap, he would be told to “take them all,” since the companies found them too battered or dirty to continue using.

 

Not one to waste things, he realized he could disassemble the damaged pallets and use the parts to make usable ones. He got together a truckload of presentable product and found a buyer in the Twin Cities. Then he used the money from his first few sales to purchase an air compressor and nail gun. By continuing to invest his profits back into his production methods, he says it took only six months until he needed more space, and had a building constructed on his parents’ farm near Silver Lake. As his system of reinvestment continued, he soon had a thriving business and a set of employees, all while still working full time at Cargill.

 

He mentions this was manageable because his wife Kathy and his parents helped supervise the finances and the production floor when he was away. He also invested a lot of his own time working evenings and weekends.

 

Within a few years, Berry Pallets had built five structures on the family farm and had landscaped a large outdoor parking area for semi trailers. Along the way, the business began processing new lumber for use in making pallets.

 

By 2011, Richard says he realized a rural location had too many setbacks to allow further growth for the business. For one thing, not many employees were willing to commute 11 miles “to the middle of nowhere” for work. For another, seasonal weight restrictions on some of the rural roads created enormous complications when raw materials needed to be acquired or product needed to be shipped. He also recognized his operation would be more efficient if, rather than spreading production across five buildings, he would consolidate it under one roof.

 

He decided to locate near Waseca, and found the space where the company is now located. When the new site first opened, he says he had 16 employees, some of whom had been with him for decades. But even while he continued to expand his workforce, he was looking for ways to speed up production to meet customer needs.

 

Enter some of the amazing machines now in use at the plant. One of them is specially designed to pick up and disassemble a used pallet in a few seconds, leaving the usable parts available to make “combination” units–a mixture of old and new boards which some of his customers are glad to buy because of their lower cost.

 

The new location allowed him to expand his product line; the company now has two semi-trailer sized kilns. In order for pallets to be used across international boundaries, the cores of their wood must be heated to a minimum of 140 degrees for at least 30 minutes–ensuring the death of any insects or other living contaminants. Once treated, the pallets can be stamped with a symbol indicating they are approved for international use.

 

Richard also takes pride in the low ecological impact of his business. He points out wood is one of nature’s most renewable resources and that, when disposed of, it does no harm to the environment. In fact, he mentions, his plant produces more than a semi-load of sawdust every day. An area farm has a system of magnets to remove any residual pieces of metal, then uses the sawdust as animal bedding.

 

“To use an old dairy saying,” jokes Richard, “we milk the cow very dry around here. There’s almost nothing we don’t repair or recycle in some way.”

 

So as quiet as things may seem at the south end of Fourth Street, Berry Pallets of Waseca is a thriving, growing business meeting regional and even international needs. “Our customers have very exacting standards,” observes Richard. “We’ve developed the systems and products that meet those needs.”