Beecraft supplies plastic pallets to Northampton and the surrounding distribution parks from its Coventry depot, thirty-five miles along the A45. We handle volume orders for national distribution centres as readily as single pallets, with no minimum and no maximum. Stock lines are typically next working day.
Northampton sits in the middle of what the property industry calls the Golden Triangle — the stretch of the M1 and M6 from which a driver can reach most of the UK population inside a single shift. That is why the national distribution centres are here rather than anywhere else.
Brackmills, the town’s big estate off Junction 15, Swan Valley at 15A, and Moulton Park and Round Spinney to the north are not factory estates. They are throughput estates. Add the rail-connected Northampton Gateway park at Junction 15 and DIRFT out at Crick, and the character of the pallet buying changes with them.
A manufacturer buys pallets for a process. A distribution centre buys a circulating population. The number you need is set by how long a pallet is out of your control, not by how many you ship a day — and that is the number most people underestimate.
Mixed footprints across a network cost real money: part-filled trailers, bespoke racking beam levels, exceptions at every automated site. Sorting the footprint out at 500 pallets is cheap. Sorting it out at 20,000 is a project.
There is no minimum and no maximum here. Stock lines usually go next working day; bespoke moulded sizes run 2–4 weeks, so a phased roll-out across several sites needs planning at the front, not the back.
Almost every Northampton operation we quote is already running pooled equipment from CHEP, LPR or IPP somewhere in the business. The honest answer is that pooling and owning solve different problems, and the deciding question is a single one: does the pallet come back?
Pooling earns its keep on open loops. If you ship to dozens of retail depots and the pallet disappears into somebody else’s network, hire is usually right. You are buying the recovery operation, not the pallet. It also flexes for seasonal peaks without leaving you with idle stock in January.
Owning earns its keep on closed loops. Trunking between your own sites, a contract packing loop with two fixed ends, a chilled circuit with a known set of customers — there the rental clock is running on a pallet that was always coming home. Buy that one.
Two things skew the sums more than people expect. The first is days out per trip: hire is priced by time, so slow-moving or long-dwell stock is expensive to rent and cheap to own. The second is the admin. Reconciling transfers, chasing dockets and settling non-return charges consumes real hours in a Brackmills office, and it does not appear on the pallet invoice.
We sell pallets, so treat that as declared interest. If your traffic is genuinely one-way into the grocery multiples, we will tell you pooling is the better answer — and then talk to you about the internal loops where it is not. See returnable transit packaging for the same logic applied to boxes.
Set the headline rates aside and compare the cost drivers. Six of them decide it, and four of the six never appear on a quotation.
| Cost driver | Pooled hire | Buying outright | What tips the decision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up-front capital | None — the cost sits in operating expenditure from day one | Paid once, for the whole circulating fleet | Whether capital or a permanent per-movement charge is the harder sell internally |
| Ongoing per-pallet cost | A rental clock that runs for as long as the pallet is out | Nothing after purchase | Days out per trip — long dwell times make hire expensive fast |
| Loss and non-return | Charged for, and chased through the account | Your loss, but no penalty and nothing to dispute | Your realistic return rate, not the one in the process document |
| Admin and reconciliation | Dockets, transfers, audits and account reconciliation | A stock count | How many hours reconciliation already takes in your office |
| Return-leg transport | Collected by the provider under the scheme | Yours to organise, or backhaul on an empty leg | Whether you already run empty vehicles back |
| End of life | Not your problem | Recyclable, and sound pallets hold residual value | How long the programme is expected to run |
Northampton is about 35 miles from our Coventry depot and the A45 runs between the two the whole way, so this is a direct trunk run rather than a carrier movement.
Brackmills, Swan Valley and the Junction 16 units mostly work to booking slots. Send the slot and the gate reference with the order and the vehicle arrives inside its window rather than queuing on the estate road.
The Coventry depot covers Northampton alongside the rest of the Midlands. If you run sites across the M1 and M6 corridors, we can consolidate them onto one delivery.
It depends on how long each pallet is out of your control and how reliably it comes back. Hire is priced by time, so a closed loop between your own sites or a fixed set of customers usually favours owning; open-loop traffic into the grocery multiples usually favours pooling, because you are really buying the recovery network. Give us your trips per year, average days out and honest loss rate and we will work it through with you rather than quote a slogan.
Yes. There is no minimum or maximum order, so we can deliver against commissioning dates site by site instead of landing the whole fleet at once. Stock lines are typically next working day; if the specification is bespoke, allow 2–4 weeks for the first batch and build that into the programme rather than the go-live week.
They are recyclable, which is the point of buying them. More than 95% of our new product range is made from recycled plastic, so end-of-life pallets go back into material rather than into a skip, and sound used pallets keep a residual value. A broken timber pallet has neither of those things.
Yes, and regularly. It is a direct A45 run from our Coventry depot. Tell us the estate, the booking slot and any gate reference when you order, along with the vehicle access — a few of the older Moulton Park and Round Spinney units are tight for a full artic and are better served on a rigid with a tail lift.
Stock lines are typically available for next working day delivery to the UK mainland, dispatched from our Coventry (CV4 9AP) depot. Custom sizes and bespoke colours usually run to 2–4 weeks depending on specification. Give us the postcode and the quantity and we will confirm a date rather than a range.
No. We supply single pallets and full loads alike, and there is no maximum either. For smaller quantities it is worth asking about used and refurbished stock, which carries the same handling characteristics at lower cost.
Yes, from our Coventry (CV4 9AP) depot on most stock lines. Call ahead so the order is picked and waiting, and tell us your vehicle type so we can confirm access and loading.
Send us the volume, the number of sites and whether the pallets come back, and we will price it properly.