CHEP Brand Guidelines: The 1946 Australian Pallet Pool Behind Brambles’ Blue Pallets

A government pool built from wartime leftovers.

CHEP’s name is an acronym: it stands for the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool. English Wikipedia traces the organisation to the Allied Materials Handling Standing Committee, which the Australian government set up to handle defence supplies during the Second World War. When the war in the Pacific ended, the American military left behind at least 60,000 wooden pallets in Australia, ABC Radio National reported in May 2014. Brambles’ own history adds about 1,000 machines, including forklift trucks and cranes, left in ports along the east coast.

In 1946, according to Brambles, the federal government took ownership of this equipment and named it the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool, with the aim of improving Australia’s industrial capability. English Wikipedia says the government kept the organisation going after the war to support the national economy. A building on Wattle Street in Ultimo, Sydney, carried the pool’s name, in a City of Sydney Archives photograph that Brambles reproduces.

The pool was sold in 1958 to Brambles, a business with roots far from pallets. Brambles says it began in 1875, when Walter Bramble started a “cut up and deliver” butchery at Hinton, near Newcastle in New South Wales, and gradually moved into carrying, transport and the removal of construction waste. It became W. E. Bramble & Sons Limited in 1925 and listed its shares in March 1954. Brambles says that when it bid for the pool it wanted the cranes and forklifts more than the pallets, which it calls “a bonus”; the purchase went through in April 1958. English Wikipedia cites two 1958 reports on the deal in the trade paper Truck & Bus Transportation.

Blue pallets, rented rather than sold.

The pallets became the business. CHEP does not sell its pallets; it rents them, ABC Radio National noted in 2014, so the company keeps ownership of each one through its working life. Cabinet magazine, in a 2014 essay on the American pallet trade by Jacob Hodes, called the system a “closed pool” and described the design: CHEP’s pallets are block pallets, with nine wooden blocks between the top and bottom decks, so forklifts can enter from all four sides. They are painted blue and, Cabinet reported, carry the words “Property of CHEP” on their sides. English Wikipedia says CHEP products can generally be recognised by their blue colour and the CHEP logo.

The range goes beyond the wooden pallet. CHEP’s Australian website lists pallets, containers, reusable plastic containers, bins, trays and store displays, among them a multi-purpose beverage tray and automotive containers, and says the company manages more than 300 million platforms shared by growers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. English Wikipedia, citing Brambles’ 2025 results, gives a pool of about 348 million pallets, crates and containers handled through more than 750 service centres. Brambles says the CHEP business mainly serves customers in consumer staples, retail, automotive and general manufacturing.

Expansion abroad began in the 1970s. Brambles says CHEP reached New Zealand in 1974 and opened CHEP UK on 1 April 1975, a move driven by Oliver Richter, who had joined Brambles in 1965 as commercial manager; CHEP Europe followed in 1978, and pallet pools in South Africa, Canada and France in the following years. CHEP USA was set up in September 1990. Brambles’ history also records a lighter moment: CHEP pallets carried the mast of the yacht Australia II in transit before the 1983 America’s Cup.

Pooling, crates and depots.

Pallet pooling and returnable packaging companies sell something unusual: the use of an object rather than the object itself. A pool operator owns pallets, crates or containers, hires them to manufacturers and growers, and collects them again after delivery. One example is CHEP, whose pallets are rented rather than sold, ABC Radio National noted in 2014, so the company keeps ownership of each one through its working life.

Because the equipment keeps moving between companies, colour does much of the identifying work. Cabinet magazine described in 2014 how CHEP’s blue pallets, stencilled “Property of CHEP,” stand out among plain timber pallets in American yards, alongside red pallets belonging to a smaller rental company, PECO. In the produce trade the recognisable object is the folding plastic crate: reusable plastic containers, or RPCs, that travel from the grower to the supermarket, often serve as the display on the shop floor, and fold flat for the return trip, as English Wikipedia describes IFCO’s system.

Behind the coloured equipment sits a network of depots and service centres where pallets and crates are inspected, repaired, washed and sent out again. English Wikipedia, citing Brambles’ 2025 results, puts CHEP’s network at more than 750 service centres; IFCO calls its own wash-and-return loop the SmartCycle. Alongside the pool operators are manufacturers of plastic pallets, bulk boxes and reusable crates.

The sector meets at intralogistics and materials-handling fairs, among them LogiMAT at the Stuttgart Trade Fair Centre and ProMat in Chicago. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, and what it says about its products — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A colour on a working object.

The American expansion was not smooth. Cabinet reported in 2014 that many CHEP pallets ended up in the yards of independent pallet recyclers, and that the company pursued their return, including through the courts. Courts generally affirmed CHEP’s right to reclaim its pallets, the magazine said, while compensation for recyclers depended on the case and on state law; a class action brought by a group of recyclers in 2008 was dismissed. ABC Radio National described CHEP’s position in the United States as a challenge for pallet recyclers there. Cabinet also noted other colours in the American market, such as red pallets belonging to a smaller rental company, PECO.

Today CHEP is the main operating brand of Brambles Limited, which publishes its announcements to the Australian Securities Exchange; English Wikipedia gives CHEP’s headquarters as Sydney. Brambles says it works in about 60 countries, “operating primarily through the CHEP brand.” It set up a digital unit, BXB Digital, in 2016 to add tracking technology to the pool. Brambles also owned IFCO, the reusable produce-crate business, after agreeing to buy it in November 2010, until it sold IFCO to Triton and a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Packaging Gateway reported in June 2019. In 2025 Brambles marked 150 years since Walter Bramble’s butchery and a century as a company.

For a design guide, CHEP shows how one colour, applied to a working object and repeated across hundreds of millions of units, can carry a brand through supply chains. Compare IFCO, the produce-crate pool Brambles owned for most of the 2010s, and Loscam, another pallet-pooling name. For this guide we use a deep pallet blue, a pale timber tone and a dark navy with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CHEP’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.