Custom Pallet Sizes vs Euro Pallet Freight Pricing: A 25-Year Wholesaler's €1,000/Month Problem

A 4AM Train to a Warehouse Full of Odd-Sized Pallets

For this episode of Cargo BTS, we took a 4am train from Berlin to Cuijk, in the Netherlands, to spend the morning with Bart Kok, owner of InterClima B.V. — an HVAC wholesaler that has been in business since 1999. The idea behind Cargo BTS is simple: leave the office, go to the actual warehouses and loading docks, and find out what people who plan shipments for a living actually struggle with. InterClima turned out to be a near-perfect case study, because almost nothing they ship comes in a standard pallet size.

25 Years From Solo Wholesaler to an 11-Person Warehouse

Bart started in the trade in 1999, working with another wholesaler in the Netherlands, then moved to a second company for a year and a half before deciding to go independent. "It’s better to do it yourself — then you don’t have anyone telling you how it has to be done," he said. He started alone; InterClima now employs 11 people.

The Cuijk warehouse the company operates from today is just over a year old, and it was built from the ground up — literally: digging out the site, pouring the concrete, erecting the steel structure. The whole project took about a year and four months. The previous warehouse was too small and too impractical — every incoming shipment meant moving existing stock out of the way just to make room.

The Product: Chillers and Accumulator Tanks

InterClima sells accumulator tanks — thermal buffer tanks used with chiller and heat pump systems. A small chiller produces chilled water (often around 6°C), but its compressor cycles on and off rather than running continuously. During the "off" portion of that cycle, the system still needs to meet cooling demand, so a tank of stored cold (or hot) water bridges the gap. The company started by selling chillers and added tanks a few years in.

Customers are almost entirely commercial: offices, industrial sites, hospitals. "I cannot imagine a building without a tank," Bart said — and the shift toward heat pumps has only increased demand, since heat pump systems typically need their own storage buffer to function properly.

250 Tanks, FIFO Rotation

Stock tanks arrive from Italy in batches of around 250, shipped three to four times a year to build up enough inventory for the Dutch market. The warehouse runs a strict first-in-first-out system — two rows of each tank type — so older stock always ships before newer stock, regardless of which pallet it happens to be sitting on.

Four Pallet Sizes, Zero Standardization

This is where the loading problem starts. The tanks ship on custom industrial pallets, not standard Euro pallets, and the pallet size depends on the tank: 90x90cm, 85x85cm, 70x70cm, and 55x55cm, all in the same shipment mix. Custom-built tanks — the ones with internal baffle plates, flanges, and connections made to order — add a fifth variable, since those are built and shipped to the forwarder’s warehouse individually rather than in standard batches.

Why Forwarders Only Price in Euro Pallets

Here’s the mismatch: forwarders price groupage freight in Euro pallet equivalents. A shipment made up of 90x90, 85x85, 70x70, and 55x55 pallets doesn’t map cleanly onto that unit, so InterClima has to convert their actual footprint into the number of Euro pallet slots the forwarder will bill for — and that conversion is rarely exact.

"We Pay for the Transport of Air"

When the conversion doesn’t line up, the truck carries unused space that still gets billed. "We put as much as possible within the reserved space — but a lot of extra movements, a lot of extra cost, without use," Bart explained. "So then you see you need more space, and sometimes it’s not efficient. But okay, it is what it is." That phrase — paying for the transport of air — is the plainest way to describe the cost of a layout that doesn’t optimize for the pricing unit the forwarder actually charges by.

The Manual Tetris: Pen, Paper, Half a Day

Today, the layout for each shipment is worked out by hand. Someone prints the packing list, regroups the tanks by size on paper — three small tanks together, one larger tank, a box that fits in the gap — and manually calculates the linear meters: this pallet is 1 meter, that group is 1.8 meters, plus another meter, divided by the trailer width, giving a fractional pallet-position count that gets rounded up to the nearest whole slot.

For Bart, who describes the process as "puzzling like Tetris," it’s close to second nature. For colleagues who aren’t spatially minded, the same exercise can take up to half a day per shipment, with real anxiety attached — a wrong call on the layout isn’t a hypothetical, it shows up as an extra line item on the freight invoice.

Alpha People vs Beta People

Bart has his own framing for why this is hard to standardize across a team: "You have alpha people and beta people. Beta people are good at calculations, physics, these kinds of things. Alpha people are languages, sales." Staff who think spatially solve the layout intuitively; staff who don’t can spend half a day doubting themselves, unsure whether a given arrangement is actually the cheapest option or just the first one that fit.

What he wants instead is straightforward: upload the shipment list and get the optimized layout back automatically, with a visual pallet-position grid the forwarder can act on directly — removing both the manual math and the self-doubt from the process.

€1,000 a Month in Avoidable Freight Cost

The numbers behind this are concrete. On a typical shipment, the difference between a well- and poorly-planned layout is usually one or two pallet positions — and one pallet position costs roughly €100. With multiple shipments a week arriving from two or three Italian factories, Bart estimates the company loses in the range of €1,000 a month to avoidable inefficiency in manual layout planning — money that, in his words, "is not necessary" once you have proper feedback on the most optimal loading plan.

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