COLAC, Victoria, Australia — Fifty years ago, Chris Meade built his first 20 onion bins on the back lawn of a rented house in the small dairy town of Colac. That was the humble beginning of CMTP, which now operates eleven sites and has become one of the largest family-owned pallet and timber packaging companies in the country. Chris and his wife, Marilyn, grew that backyard operation into a national manufacturer with around 270 employees.
Chris Meade, the owner and co-founder of CMTP, recounted, “We started the business after a local brick supplier complained about the cost of the wooden pallets he needed returned. This business problem identified an opportunity. We started asking questions and realized that we could solve this problem and secured our first order.”
Early Struggles, Then Growth
The name CMTP itself is a tribute to the family focus of the business. “CM stands for Chris and Marilyn, and TP stands for Timber and Packaging,” Chris noted. “From the beginning, my wife and I have been partners, and we are glad that the second generation of our family is now leading the business.”
The early years were lean. The Meades rented a shed, kept a handful of employees, and Chris and Marilyn often worked through the night. Marilyn’s shift ran to three or four in the morning; Chris arrived at four to load bins and pallets before the next day started around seven. Money was tight, and the growing pains were real. In 1983, drought hit the potato and onion growers who made up much of CMTP’s early customer base, and the wider Australian economy was soft. Later in the decade, interest rates climbed as high as 18.5%, squeezing a young manufacturer that was financing new machinery at the time.
But the hard stretches were punctuated by breaks that changed the company’s trajectory. In 1985, after five years of pursuit, CMTP landed its first pallet order from Loscam, one of Australia’s major pallet pooling companies. This is a relationship that continues today. Around the same period, the company picked up a contract packing automotive components for shipment to New Zealand, a job that stretched its capabilities. This automotive contract almost overnight grew the workforce from three or four employees to 14 in just 10 days.
A bigger turning point came in 2008, when CMTP acquired what was then Aspect Packaging’s Adelaide operation. This was a much larger business than CMTP, but it had been losing money for nine months straight. “We took over on April Fool’s Day and made a profit on the first day,” Chris Meade noted. CMTP went back later that year and bought controlling interest in the rest of the business. It was, by his own account, an emotionally taxing stretch that took a couple of years to stabilize. This risk was made harder by a soft economy at the time. But it also coincided with Travis Meade, Chris and Marilyn’s son, stepping further into leadership. This spread the leadership burden and helped build out a proper management team across the organization.
With roughly 270 employees across the country, CMTP’s workforce carries forward the culture Chris and Marilyn Meade built from the ground up. This focus is now reinforced by the company’s “Daily Boss” scoreboard system that gives every site a same-day view of performance.
The complete Aspect Packaging acquisition set the pattern for the growth that followed. “We’ve had a lot of growth through acquisition over the last few years,” acknowledged Travis Meade, now managing director and a 26-year veteran of the business. “Since 2018, we’ve doubled the size of the business,” through four or five acquisitions around the country. The logic is geographic as much as financial: pallets are bulky, low-value freight, so CMTP wants plants close to the customers who use them. “We’ve got a big country, and we’re shipping a product that involves a lot of air,” Travis said. “We’d like to be nice and close to the end user to make the business profitable.”
Acquisitions aren’t simply absorbed as-is. “It’s usually a lot of change,” Travis said. “We try to really convert the operations we buy to the CMTP way of doing things.” That typically means new equipment, tidied-up facilities, updated safety practices and a hard look at whether every line of work still fits the business CMTP wants to run. “We have a reputation in Australia of running clean, state-of-the-art facilities, and we want to make sure all of what we have is the same.”
A Diversified Product Mix
Pallets make up roughly half of CMTP’s business today, with the balance split between cases and crates, and cardboard packaging – the latter serving just-in-time delivery programs for the automotive industry. Produce bins, the product line that started the whole company, remain a significant piece of the business, supplying potato, onion, citrus, nut and other agricultural growers.
On the pallet side, CMTP supplies both new stringer pallets and stock for Australia’s pallet pooling systems, primarily Loscam and CHEP. CMTP runs Loscam pallet volumes that can reach 60,000 pallets in a single month.
Viking, Holtec and Baker: The Backbone of the Plant Floor
Ask Travis Meade about what sets CMTP’s operations apart, and the conversation quickly turns to the equipment lineup. CMTP has found equipment that it likes and tends to deploy across its various plants. Three of the names are very familiar to Pallet Enterprise readers – Viking, Holtec and Baker.
Viking equipment sits at the center of most CMTP plant floors. The company runs nine Viking Champion machines across the country along with a couple of Turbos.
The Viking relationship goes back three decades. CMTP bought its first Viking around 1995, and at the time, there were only two Vikings in the country, both in Tasmania. Chris traveled down to see them running before committing. “We liked the robustness of the Viking, and we felt that it fitted what we wanted at the time — to be able to produce good, accurate pallets for the pool system, for the hire pallet system.”
CMTP still owns one of those original Tasmanian machines, and it’s still in operation. Service has held up well over the relationship too, even across time zones. “Viking is really good when it comes to service, and their parts department has come through reliably when we need a part to keep a machine running.”
“The Champions have been an ideal machine for the Australian market, because the volumes of pallets a customer buys are generally a bit smaller,” Travis commented. CMTP recently ordered a CAPE Mach 2 machine set to arrive next year to evaluate its changeover performance in the Australian market.
When it comes to lumber processing, Holtec crosscut saws and docking equipment are spread across the group. Three Variocut® crosscut systems and four Transcut® portable crosscut units are at CMTP’s smaller sites. “Holtec saws have been good machines for us,” Travis noted. “They are reliable, dock accurately and suit the quality that we’re trying to achieve.”
Baker equipment is also a staple at CMTP. Travis said, “We’ve got a couple of Baker resaws and double-end notchers across the business. They are good, reliable machines. They just do the job.” Baker has a personal connection at CMTP as well. Paul Menzies, CMTP’s marketing manager, got his start on a Baker saw as a university student, 20 years before returning to the company in his current marketing role.
CMTP also runs a sawmill of its own, in Branxholm, and post peeling in Scottsdale, Tasmania. Scottsdale focused primarily on treated pine posts for agricultural fencing, and the Branxholm Sawmill produces timber for the pallet business. But this is limited by the logistics of crossing the Bass Strait. On the mainland, AKD is the company’s major timber supplier, with cants typically arriving in six-meter packs before CMTP resaws them to size in-house.
At the company’s Tasmania sawmill, CMTP highlighted the success of USNR optimization equipment. Dale Jessup, general manager of the Tasmania plant, commented, “The USNR log optimization system transformed our Branxholm saw line operation. Installed in 2019 during a short shutdown, it immediately delivered an 8% increase in timber recovery and a 20% lift in production. Beyond the technology itself, USNR’s commitment to understanding our business and tailoring the solution to our requirements has made them a trusted partner.”
Besides the Vikings, there are numerous other nailing options at the Colac plant including a Storti tandem pallet machine. Put in service in 2005, this machine produces CMTP’s stringer pallets for the Loscam program. The two Yaskawa Motoman robots at the Adelaide and Dandenong sites handle repeatable production of pallets, asparagus boxes and wine-industry products. Travis said, “Deploying robots is an automation step that has set us apart from many of our Australian competitors.” On the sawmilling and timber-prep side, the plant runs a resaw line for breaking down cants, Weinig dockers for preparing crate and case components, a USNR log optimizer, a Morbark post peeler, System TM automatic stackers out of the optimizer and double-end notcher line. The company has Mahild dry kilns for drying lumber to control moisture and mold growth. Also, a new multi-rip line is on order for the Queensland operation as CMTP continues investing in processing efficiency for the cants it increasingly buys from mills.
Scoreboard Culture
Perhaps the most distinctive part of CMTP’s operation isn’t a machine at all. It’s the DailyBOSS program, an in-house-built system that gives every site a same-day profit-and-loss picture. Instead of waiting until the following month to find out whether a day’s production was profitable, employees can see how they are performing during their workday. “It’s hard to play a game without a score-board,” is how the program is described inside the business. The software was developed by long-serving employee Paul Langdon, whose nickname gave the program its name.
Historically, that data came from handwritten production sheets keyed into the system at day’s end. CMTP is now automating the process by trialing Zira AI vision cameras across several sites over the past few months. These cameras capture live data including pallet counts, output per hour and machine downtime. Screens on the production floor give crews a live view of performance throughout the shift, much like a scoreboard.
Josh Martin, digital projects lead for CMTP, said, “As we roll the technology out across our sites, consistent data will allow us to compare performance like-for-like, identify opportunities to improve efficiency and, ultimately, feed production data directly into DailyBOSS, reducing the need for manual end-of-shift production sheets.”
“We’re always looking to grow the business, and the people who work for us want to grow the business as well,” Travis said of the culture the scoreboard approach reinforces.
Quality and Sustainability
Rising customer expectations have reshaped how CMTP runs its quality program over the past decade. Issues that were once tolerated — a touch of blue stain, a bit of sawdust on a finished pallet — are no longer acceptable to most customers. Food and beverage buyers have come especially quality focused. As a result, CMTP’s Colac and Dandenong sites, two of its largest, are ISO 9001 certified. Although the company applies the same quality processes across nearly all of its plants regardless, certification helps the company provide third-party validation of its quality focus.
Managing mold and blue stain varies by region and season. In humid Queensland, CMTP uses anti-sapstain treatments and leans on hoop pine, which resists staining better than radiata or slash pine. CMTP also relies on kiln drying to get moisture out of timber destined for food-industry customers. The company holds PEFC chain-of-custody certification for its lumber sourcing. Travis Meade believes CMTP may be the only Australian pallet manufacturer with that credential. CMTP has also achieved HACCP food-safety certification. Both of these efforts are aimed at giving food and beverage customers added confidence in the supply chain.
A Family Business, Into a Third Generation
Chris and Marilyn’s four sons all have ties to the business today. Travis leads CMTP as managing director. Matthew, the eldest, oversees national safety and training. Paul runs the family’s farming operations. Xavier has built his own business in the meat industry. Paul Langdon, the DailyBOSS creator, has been with the company so long that Chris Meade jokes the only thing separating him from the family is his surname.
The third generation has already started. Travis’s son, Max, has begun sweeping floors after school – the same starting point Paul Langdon had two decades ago, and one Chris Meade himself understands well from CMTP’s earliest days.
Chris still answers the phone at the business he founded and remains a director. Travis leads day-to-day operations and strategy. “I’m extremely happy with the succession that’s taken place,” Chris affirmed. “Travis’ ability to lead the company, and the senior management team’s ability to lead the company, gives me enormous confidence that we will continue to grow and perform at a really high level. That my family can keep going, perform at a high level and be positioned for continued success in the future — that’s something I’m extraordinarily proud of.”
Looking Ahead
CMTP isn’t slowing down as it marks 50 years. The company recently launched Echidna Built, a modular housing brand manufactured at its Colac facility that applies five decades of timber manufacturing know-how to factory-built homes. This new endeavor is a sign of how far the business has stretched beyond its pallet and packaging roots.
On the core business, growth remains the stated goal. “Australia is a big market, and there’s lots more of it to try and get,” Travis commented. CMTP is evaluating new geographic territory, continued organic growth and further acquisitions where the fit makes sense. The manufacturer is continuing to invest in automation to offset a tight labor market. Travis said, “Labor seems to be a problem that pallet companies face around the world. It’s the same challenge everywhere.”
CMTP will mark the formal anniversary of its September 6, 1976, founding with a celebration in Geelong on October 10th. The company will host more than 150 guests including suppliers, customers, and current and former employees. They will look back at the last five decades and recognize the incredible accomplishments of the Meade family and CMTP employees.
Why has CMTP become an Australian success story? Chris explained, “We matched what was needed in the market.” Reflecting on the company’s growth and staying power, he added, “We were in the right area at the right time. We continued to offer a service that was on time and really high quality. I think that was a key part of our long-term success.”
