Plastic pallets from fruit and vegetable packers: what a load needs

What fruit and vegetable packers use

Beverage-style 56 x 44 and 48 x 40 pallets for cans and jars, plus 43 x 43 bulk bag pallets for additives and ingredients.

Why the pallets break or retire

A pack season ends and the yard is cleared. Sugar and acid residue stain decks. A customer standard change retires a footprint.

What a load from here needs

Sticky residue grinds badly. Rinse where you can and say where you cannot. Count by footprint, because 56 x 44 and 48 x 40 are separate jobs.

Photograph a stack from the side, and a stained deck. Then add the ZIP, the count and the footprint.

Where this industry is biggest

BLS counted 173,844 private jobs across 2,936 establishments in fruit and vegetable preserving (NAICS 3114) in 2025. The states with the most jobs were California (27,518), Wisconsin (11,014), Washington (10,988), Ohio (10,327) and Texas (9,194).

Where fruit and vegetable preserving sits among the thirteen

Of the thirteen industries on this site, fruit and vegetable preserving ranks 11 by jobs, with 2.1% of the thirteen’s 8,423,298 combined jobs, and 6 by jobs per site, at 59.2 against 42.6 for all thirteen together. Big sites usually mean big piles and fewer, larger loads. Small sites mean more calls and smaller trailers.

Writing the request for fruit and vegetable preserving

Name the plant type, the pallet size you hold and the count, give the pickup ZIP and say whether trucks can reach a dock. For fruit and vegetable preserving, add what the pallets carried and whether they were washed, since that history shapes how a recycler grades the lot. Photographs of a typical pallet and of the pile make the reply faster and more exact.