Name a B2B commodity where a single facility can have 20 to 30 independent suppliers within a 50-mile radius. Packaging? It is dominated by national contracts. Waste management? A few major players have largely consolidated it. Raw materials? Global supply chains rule the day. But pallets? Pallets are different. They are produced, recycled and redistributed by a fragmented network of local operators. This includes sawmills, recyclers, and specialty manufacturers that are scattered across every industrial corridor in the country. No other product category in the supply chain has this kind of supplier density at the local level. And yet, almost nobody treats pallet procurement like the local market it truly is.
Instead, most companies apply the same playbook they use for every other category: a national RFQ sent to a shortlist of known vendors, scored on a spreadsheet, and awarded to whoever comes in lowest. It is a process designed for commodities with centralized supply. Pallets are not that. And the mismatch between how companies buy pallets and how the pallet market actually operates is costing both sides of the industry.
The National RFQ Problem
Here is how it usually works. A procurement team puts together an RFQ covering 15, 30 or maybe 50 facilities. They send it to the same handful of suppliers they already know – maybe a national supplier, a couple of regionals, and a recycler or two who happen to be in the Rolodex. Bids come back. Someone builds a comparison spreadsheet. The lowest numbers win. Everyone moves on.
On the surface, it looks like a competitive process. But zoom in on any individual facility and the picture changes. That distribution center in central Ohio? There might be a dozen qualified recyclers within 50 miles who never saw the RFQ. The manufacturing plant outside Charlotte? Three local suppliers could have undercut the national price by 15%, but they were never invited to the table.
The fundamental problem is this: a national RFQ treats pallet procurement as if supply is uniform. It is not. Supply is hyperlocal. Pricing is hyperlocal. Competition is hyperlocal. And when you run a process that ignores that reality, you end up overpaying in some markets and under-competing in others.
What Buyers are Missing
Most procurement teams do not know what they do not know about their own pallet supply chain. They see the total spend number. They see the contracted price per unit. What they do not see is the market they are leaving on the table.
Consider a company with 40 facilities across the eastern United States. A traditional RFQ might generate bids from eight vendors. But a location-by-location analysis could reveal that across those 40 facilities, there are more than 200 qualified pallet suppliers within competitive range. That is not a rounding error. That is an entirely different competitive landscape.
The reason this matters is not just price, although price improvement is a natural outcome of real competition. It is also about supply resilience. When your pallet program depends on two or three vendors covering a national footprint, you are one truck shortage or one plant closure away from a disruption. When you have qualified local alternatives identified and engaged at every location, you have built-in redundancy. The supply chain gets stronger, not just cheaper.
The Vendor Side
This problem is not one-sided. For every buyer overpaying due to a lack of competition, there is a local vendor who never got the chance to compete.
The pallet industry is full of well-run operation yards moving thousands of units a day, recyclers with efficient repair lines, manufacturers with capacity to spare – who are invisible to the national procurement process. They do not have a sales team calling on Fortune 500 accounts. They are not on the approved vendor list. They exist 50 miles from the facility and have no idea there is an RFQ happening.
For these vendors, the current system is a closed loop. The same nationals and large regionals see every bid. The local operator, no matter how competitive, gets shut out – not because they cannot perform, but because nobody asked.
Opening up the process does not just benefit buyers. It creates a more honest market for vendors too. When a local recycler finally gets a shot at the facility down the road, they are competing on their own turf. Their freight is minimal. Their response time is measured in hours, not days. That is a fair fight, and in most cases, they win it.
A Better Approach: The Micro RFQ
The solution is what I call a micro RFQ. Instead of running one blanket bid across the entire network, you break it down by location. For each facility, you identify every qualified supplier within a range and invite them into a localized bid.
Think of it as flipping the RFQ on its head. Rather than starting with a vendor list and asking what they can cover, you start with each facility and ask who can serve it best. The yard 20 minutes away, who has never seen a corporate RFQ gets the same opportunity as the national with 40 locations.
This is not about replacing national suppliers. Nationals play an important role, especially for companies that need consistency and scale. But even the best national program has gaps-facilities where a local vendor could deliver better pricing, faster service, or both. The micro RFQ finds those gaps and fills them with competition.
The result is a pallet program that reflects the market as it actually exists: local, fragmented, and deeply competitive – if you know where to look.
The Missing Link
The pallet industry has evolved in almost every way except procurement. Vendors have modernized their operations. Buyers have sophisticated supply chain teams. But the process that connects them has not changed in decades. It is still a spreadsheet, a shortlist and a lowest-bid decision.
The missing link is not technology or talent. It is visibility. The suppliers are there. The competition is there. The savings are there. Someone just has to open the door. For buyers, that means rethinking what a competitive bid actually looks like in a hyperlocal market. For vendors, it means the most competitive supply chain in the industry is finally getting the transparency it deserves.
Pallets are local. It is time the procurement process caught up.
Editor’s Note: Robert Gregg is vice president of partner development for Pallet Solutions USA. He has years of experience in pallet sales and brokering. He recently created a tool where pallet buyers can type in a zip code, and the system shows you every pallet supplier within range. Recyclers, manufacturers, mills – broken down by types and distances. See how this tool can help you reach more local suppliers at https://pallet-solutions-network.netlify.app/. Notice: The opinions expressed by Robert Gregg are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Pallet Enterprise staff.
