Grade A Pallets
The top condition tier we stock. Minimal cosmetic wear, no broken or missing boards, and the original structural integrity intact, for the loads where the state of the pallet is part of the job it is doing.
What Grade A means
Grade A describes condition and nothing else. A Grade A pallet has been used, usually only once or twice, and it looks it: clean boards, square corners, no splits running through a deck board, nothing missing and nothing patched. The stringers are sound, the deck sits flat, and the footprint is consistent enough that a machine can handle it without somebody standing next to the machine.
Most of what we hold in this grade is the standard GMA 48x40 footprint, which is the size nearly every receiving dock in the country is already set up for. That matters more than it sounds: a pallet that fits the rack, the truck and the customer's own handling equipment causes no argument at the far end, and the pallet nobody mentions is the one that did its job.
What Grade A is not is a load rating. A, B and C are condition grades in the used pallet trade, not tested classes, so we publish no weight figures against them. What any particular pallet will carry depends on the pallet, how the load sits on it, and whether it is racked, stacked or moved on a jack. If you are racking a load or moving heavy product, tell us the weight and how it will be handled and we will talk it through before you order.
When the condition is worth paying for
Grade A costs more than Grade B, so the useful question is not which grade is better. It is whether the condition is doing work for you. There are four situations where it clearly is.
The first is anything a customer sees. A pallet that goes onto a retail floor, into a showroom, or in front of the person paying the invoice is part of the presentation whether you intended it to be or not. The second is automated handling. Conveyors, wrappers and automated storage read the pallet as a shape, and a shape that varies is a stoppage; consistent dimensions and no protruding boards are worth more to an automated line than they are to a forklift driver who can compensate.
The third is racking, where fit and condition both matter and a pallet that is out of square is a problem several metres in the air. The fourth is receiving operations working to a hygiene or inspection standard of their own, where a stained or patched pallet gets rejected at the gate regardless of whether it would have carried the load.
If none of those describe the work, the money is usually better spent elsewhere. Warehouse storage, internal movement and business-to-business shipments where nobody is looking at the pallet are exactly what Grade B pallets are for, at a lower price for the same footprint.
How stock is inspected and graded
Grading is a physical inspection, done pallet by pallet as stock comes back in. Every pallet is looked at rather than sampled, because a grade applied to a stack rather than to a pallet is a guess, and the one that lets you down is the one nobody turned over.
Anything with a broken or missing board, a split stringer or a deck that does not sit flat comes out of this grade. Some of it is repairable and becomes Grade B; the rest is recycled. The point of the process is that the grade on the paperwork is the grade on the truck, so what arrives at your dock is what you agreed to buy.
What to tell us when you order
Four things get you a price and a date without a second phone call: how many you need, whether this is a one-off or a repeating order, where they are going, and what is going on them. That last one is the one people skip, and it is the one that changes the answer most often.
Tell us as well if the pallets have to satisfy somebody else's receiving standard, because it is cheaper to know that before the truck loads than after it arrives. There is no hard minimum order, but around fifty pallets is the point where a dedicated delivery starts to make economic sense; below that we will usually look at combining your drop with another in your area, or arranging collection from our yard.
Same-week delivery is standard across Metro Atlanta and West Georgia. How ordering, quantities and drop trailers work is set out in full on our pallet supply service page.
If the receiving end has asked for treated timber as well as a condition, our heat treated pallets page covers what the treatment is, and the two are specified together rather than one implying the other.
Where no standard footprint fits the product at all, we build custom size pallets to your dimensions instead.
The rest of the range sits on the products overview.
Get a price for Grade A
Tell us how many, where they are going and what is going on them, and we will come back with a price and a delivery date.