How to pack a pallet so it arrives intact

A pallet that fails in transit almost never fails because the driver drove badly. It fails because of how it was built. Goods shift, a corner collapses, the load leans, and from that point every handling movement makes it worse.

The good news is that the things that go wrong are a short list, and all of them are fixable in the loading bay before the vehicle arrives.

Start with the right pallet

Check the pallet itself before you put anything on it. A split board, a missing block or a protruding nail is a failure waiting to happen, and it is the cheapest thing on the whole job to replace.

Match the footprint to the goods. A UK pallet is 1200 × 1000 mm and a Euro pallet is 1200 × 800 mm. Goods must sit within that footprint, because overhang is the single most common cause of damage: anything past the edge takes the first impact from a forklift, a dock plate or the pallet next to it.

If you are sending internationally, the pallet may need to be heat treated and marked to ISPM 15. That is a wood packaging rule, not a freight preference, and an unmarked pallet can be refused at a border.

Build the stack for stability, not for tidiness

Heaviest at the bottom. Always. A heavy item part-way up a stack turns every movement into a lever.

Keep the load square and keep it level. A stack that leans by a few degrees on your floor will lean more after the first corner.

Interlock the layers where you can. Bricklaying the boxes across layer boundaries ties the stack together. Stacking identical columns does not.

Do not build a pyramid. It looks stable and it is not: a narrowing stack has nothing to brace against and nothing for strapping to bite on.

Fill the voids. Gaps let goods move, and movement is what causes damage. Void fill is cheaper than a claim.

Wrap it properly

Stretch wrap is doing a structural job, not a cosmetic one. It is what ties the goods to the pallet.

• Start at the base and include the pallet itself. Wrap the bottom layer onto the deck boards. A load wrapped only to itself is a load that slides off the pallet as one unit.
• Overlap each pass by about half. Gaps are weak points.
• Work up and then back down. Several passes, not one.
• Pull it tight enough to compress the load slightly. Loose wrap does nothing but keep the rain off.
• Corner boards on anything with a vulnerable edge. They spread the strapping pressure and stop the wrap cutting in.

For heavy or tall loads, strapping over the top and under the pallet deck adds a mechanical restraint that wrap cannot provide on its own.

Protect against the things that actually happen

Goods on a pallet get rained on while they are being moved between a yard and a vehicle, they get stacked under something, and they get pushed by a forklift. Build for that:

• a top sheet or a cap on anything that must stay dry
• a hard cap on anything that may be double-stacked
• “do not double stack” clearly marked if it must not be, and accept that this may change the price, because it takes a floor space that cannot be shared

Label it so a stranger can act on it

The person handling your pallet at three in the morning has never met you and has no context.

• Delivery address on at least two sides, ideally all four
• A contact name and number for the delivery point
• Your own reference, and the carrier’s, if you have it
• Handling marks that mean something: this way up, fragile, do not double stack
• Remove or cross out old labels. A pallet carrying two addresses will eventually be delivered to the wrong one

Weigh it and measure it before you book

Guessing here is what turns a quote into a different invoice. Measure the total height from the floor including the pallet, measure the footprint including any overhang you could not avoid, and get a weight.

If the figures put you over a network’s height or weight limit, that is much better to discover in your own yard than at a depot.

The handling reality worth knowing

A palletised consignment on a network is lifted, set down, moved and re-stacked repeatedly between collection and delivery. Every one of those movements is a chance for a badly built pallet to fail.

A pallet on a dedicated vehicle is loaded once and unloaded once. That is the real argument for a dedicated vehicle on fragile or high-value goods, and it is worth weighing against the cost difference rather than defaulting to the cheaper line.

Pallet and freight work covers both. If you are unsure which route suits your goods, describe them on the quote form and it gets worked out before anything moves.