PAKi Brand Guidelines: The 1974 Ennepetal Open-Pooling Firm for Euro Pallets and Box Pallets

A pallet-exchange service from Ennepetal.

PAKi Logistics organises the exchange of pallets rather than making them. The company, based in Ennepetal, in North Rhine-Westphalia, says PAKi Logistics GmbH was founded in 1974 by a group of logistics experts who saw the potential of exchangeable load carriers. In February 2012 the trade journal Warehouse & Logistics News described PAKi as having organised logistics services across Europe for more than 35 years.

Its business is what it calls open pooling. As the company describes it, pallets and box pallets built to a common standard can be swapped between companies: a supplier hands over loaded euro pallets and receives the same number of empty ones in return. PAKi manages that exchange for transport companies, retailers and manufacturers. It keeps account of who owes what, delivers and collects load carriers, and sorts them by quality, so that customers can get the number and grade of pallets they need where they need them. In 2012 Warehouse & Logistics News described the same service in similar terms: PAKi used web-based technology so that customers in industry, trade and transport had load carriers of the right quality available in the right quantity, at the right time and place.

PAKi also claims a part in the standard itself. The company says it took part in founding the European Pallet Association (EPAL) in 1991, and that this helped the open pool develop across Europe and stay reliable.

The brand writes its name with a capital K and a small i — PAKi — and uses the full form PAKi Logistics on its website and in its news.

Joining the Faber Halbertsma group.

PAKi changed owners in 2012. In February that year, Warehouse & Logistics News reported that the Faber Halbertsma Group, a Dutch family business based at Eck en Wiel in the Netherlands, had acquired PAKi Logistics. At the time, the report said, PAKi worked with more than a hundred specialists, 10,000 pooling stations and more than two million pallets, boxes and plastic load carriers. The buyer completed the deal under a new short name, FHG, and announced that PAKi would be re-branded FHG PAKi. Ingrid Faber, chief executive of FHG, called the takeover a major step in the group’s growth strategy, and PAKi’s chief executive, Christian Kühnhold, said the existing management would stay.

The branding changed again two years later. In December 2014 the German trade paper VerkehrsRundschau reported that PAKi would from then on appear under the new green logo of the group’s umbrella brand, Pooling Partners. The paper said PAKi then had more than 150 staff coordinating the flow of pallets and box pallets in Europe, with 10,000 pooling stations, and was run by Christian Agasse and Christian Kühnhold.

Today the group calls itself the Faber Group. PAKi says it is a family-owned company founded in 1891, led by Ingrid Faber, whose other businesses include IPP Logipal, PRS Return System, vPOOL and SATIM. PAKi says Faber has more than 130 years of history in making wooden load carriers.

PAKi also worked on the load carriers themselves. It says that from 2012 it redesigned the plastic quarter pallet, made entirely from recycled material and able to carry point-of-sale displays, and then the Düsseldorf half pallet; both are now managed in the IPP pool. In 2015, it says, it began offering the ECON collapsible euro container, a plastic container the size of a box pallet that folds flat when empty.

Returnable packaging and pooling.

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.

From the Ruhr to Iberia.

PAKi has grown through acquisitions of its own. In February 2019 VerkehrsRundschau reported that PAKi, as part of the Dutch Faber Halbertsma group, had taken over the pooling and logistics arm of the German vPool group, based at Wörnitz in Bavaria. The business continued as vPool Logistics GmbH, keeping customers’ load-carrier accounts and the Wörnitz staff. Christian Agasse, PAKi’s managing director, said the pooling of Euro meat crates and H1 pallets would strengthen its position with the meat-processing trade; the transaction took effect on 1 February 2019.

In April 2026 PAKi announced that it had acquired Poolback, a Spanish pallet-pooling company, from Rotom, to strengthen its presence in Spain and Portugal. The company says it wants to build a harmonised open pooling system across Europe. In that announcement, Annegret Kramer-Münch was named as PAKi’s chief executive.

The service now rests on a network of what the company calls PAKi Spots — more than 10,000 loading and unloading points across Europe, it says — and on digital tools. PAKi offers an e-Voucher system for pallet exchange, an online portal and a driver app, alongside the exchange, rental and sale of euro pallets and box pallets. Its product pages list wooden pallets, euro pallets, half pallets and box pallets among the load carriers it manages, and give the euro pallet’s size as 1,200 by 800 millimetres, 144 millimetres high, with separate product lists for each of its European markets.

For a design guide, PAKi shows how a service with no product of its own builds a brand from a standard, a network and a short, distinctive name. Compare CHEP and Euro Pool System, two other European pooling names. For this guide we use pool green, pallet timber and mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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