SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ — John Vaccaro remembers walking through
his father’s soda factory watching bottles of soda of all flavors being filled
and capped on a rolling assembly line and placed into crates. Then his father
would load the finished product into a truck, and drive to local bodegas
throughout Brooklyn, chatting up owners, asking about their families and their business,
and building a market for his locally made soda pop.
As the industry evolved, eventually local soda bottlers and their neighborhood-branded soda products were displaced by large beverage companies. So, the senior Vaccaro, sensing the need to pivot, changed along with it. Major beverage companies needed local distribution. And in an early nod to outsourcing, those beverage makers didn’t want the trucks themselves. They wanted a trusted partner to hire the drivers and operate trucks on their behalf, a partner for whom trucking and distribution was their core competency, who knew the area and knew the customers.
And with that, Bettaway Beverage Distributors was born, with an initial fleet of one tractor trailer and two side-loader straight trucks doing beverage delivery. The focus was on beverage distribution, initially with Snapple as its first customer, serving the New York City boroughs. That was 1983. Several years later, adding other start-up beverage businesses like Arizona Iced Tea, the trucking operation was expanded into a third-party logistics provider, and a new division was created – Bettaway Traffic Systems.
Still later in the early 1990s, to address the emerging need for supply, maintenance and management of pallets – the wooden platform which is the foundation on which millions of shipments ride in trucks every day – Bettaway Pallet Systems was formed.
Now as 2024 passes the halfway mark, Bettaway is celebrating four decades of service as a local, family-owned New Jersey business. No longer is it just a distributor of beverages. Today, after some half-dozen reinventions and expansions, adding related businesses such as dedicated warehousing and pallet supply, and jumping early into emerging market opportunities like beverage packing and fulfillment, Bettaway Supply Chain Services has become one of New Jersey’s leading integrated logistics, trucking, supply chain and pallet management companies.
The firm supports a wide range of beverage and other businesses with logistics, warehousing, order fulfillment and custom packaging, and transportation services across the Northeast. As it continued to build the Bettaway brand, it won the business – and the trust – of many other leading brands. Among those are Monster Beverages, SOBE, Vitamin Water, Fuze, ZICO, Voss, Lumber Liquidators, Apple, Eve, White Rock, Manhattan Special, Boylan Bottling, Poland Spring and Nestle Waters. Bettaway also has enjoyed a 30-year business relationship with both Coca Cola and Pepsi.
Responding to increasing demand for services, and the drive for more efficiency, strategic investments were made in technology, particularly on the warehousing and beverage fulfillment side. These included investments over the last several years in packaging automation systems, including automated variety pack lines, carton assembly systems and palletizers, which today enable Bettaway to assemble and produce shrink-wrapped cases of beverages for clients, with capacity for millions of cases annually and the ability to expand.
The company also welcomed other strategic partners on board, including logistics industry titans such as C.H. Robinson. Coyote and Arrive Logistics.
From soda bottling to pallets to logistics and fulfillment
Today, Bettaway supplies pallets - and manages pallet inventories in the millions -- for beverage manufacturers, distributors and consumer products companies at some 500 depots across the U.S.
John Vaccaro, the company’s second-generation leader, along with his sister, Laura, learned first-hand from his father about anticipating customer needs and evolving with them – and how that would lead to growth and success. “Pallets is a good example,” he notes. “In the early ‘90s there were no rental pallets and a poorly designed pallet exchange program. The market was ripe for innovation. So, we created a pallet retrieval and supply management program for Snapple customers. That expanded into providing pallets to all the bottlers who produced Snapple products,” he recalled.
Third-party pallet supply and management was a new concept for the industry. For Vaccaro, it was the same story about identifying an unmet customer need, investing in the service, being first to market with it, and then investing to build it. “As the market became aware [of the Snapple program] that happened about six times over with other beverage brands. And then consumer products companies jumped on board,” Vaccaro recalled.
“We just kept looking for ways to anticipate and stay one step ahead of what customers needed,” Vaccaro added, noting that the strategy has since extended into logistics technology, high-tech trucks, warehouse automation and advanced logistics analytics and supply chain engineering.
“It’s a long and winding road of adapting to change, taking risks, investing without a guarantee, and betting on your gut and your intuition,” Vaccaro said. “We wanted to make our relationship more valuable to the customer than just being a trucker,” he added.
Bringing digital e-Commerce to pallets
Now having surpassed 40 years in business, Vaccaro sees an industry continuing to change and evolve – and presenting new opportunities. One that Bettaway has recently embraced has been bringing digital e-commerce technology to what has been a mostly manual and fractured process of buying and selling pallets.
The company in 2022 launched PalletTrader, the industry’s first neutral, independent online site where pallet buyers and sellers can post their needs and their inventories, negotiate a price, complete a transaction and arrange transportation – all through one familiar e-commerce like process.
Historically, most pallet transactions were conducted in a very manual process, typically by phone, email or fax, and with pallet sales reps going door to door to pallet yards.
With PalletTrader, “it’s like buying something on Amazon, or posting something for sale on EBay,” Vaccaro noted. “We wanted to make the process as convenient, familiar and simple as possible – and streamline a transaction that previously would have taken hours of manual work and do it in minutes online.”
“We believe this will really help connect pallet sellers and buyers, over a neutral platform, in a much more efficient and faster process. And the better news is that the financial part of the transaction also is online, so sellers are paid immediately upon delivery, instead of having to wait 30 days for a check.”
Since its launch in 2022, PalletTrader has assembled the largest single point network of pallet providers in the United States. Several million pallets have been transacted over the platform and it continues to grow daily.
What’s next for Bettaway?
“We’ve got a model and a philosophy that has worked for 40 years, and we’re going to stick with it,” Vaccaro says. “Create value for the customer. Do what you say. Honor your commitments. Understand the customer’s business as well as your own so you can anticipate and respond to emerging customer needs.” And, Vaccaro adds, “don’t be afraid to try something new. If you’re not willing to take a risk, you’ll never gain the benefit of new knowledge and experience and the rewards that can come with it.”
About Bettaway Supply Chain Services: South Plainfield, NJ-based Bettaway is an integrated material handling, transportation, and supply chain management company. A family-owned business for 40 years, Bettaway is an industry leader in pallet supply and management solutions, providing a managed service incorporating a network of some 500 facilities and a centralized suite of pallet services. The company also provides quality transportation with its own dedicated fleets on both the east and west coasts, and national 3PL network. Value-added services include a full-scope warehouse operation with a variety-pack line, e-commerce fulfillment and distribution management for beverage and other CPG products, as well as supply chain consulting. Bettaway also is the founder and operator of PalletTrader, the supply chain industry’s first neutral, collaborative eCommerce marketplace for online posting, buying, selling and delivery of white wood pallets.
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Custom, automated beverage variety pack, cartoning, assembly and distribution services