Rehrig Pacific Brand Guidelines: A 1913 Dairy-Crate Maker Still Run by the Rehrig Family

Wooden boxes for the milk trade.

Rehrig Pacific began in Los Angeles in 1913. The company says a young carpenter, Will Rehrig, combined woodworking with a knack for designing machinery and built a business supplying manufactured wooden containers; the Los Angeles Business Journal reported in February 2014 that he founded it that year “as a business making reusable wooden crates.” Its customers were dairies, and the business, then called Rehrig Box & Manufacturing Co., grew into a supplier to the milk industry, the company says.

The company’s own history is frank about the hard years. It says the Great Depression and the Second World War slowed the business, and that the second generation, Bud Rehrig, managed it through them and built it up along the West Coast. It also says that in 1929 there had been nine milk-crate makers in California and that it later became the only one; we give that as the company’s claim.

The materials changed with the decades. In the 1930s, it says, it began making crates from steel wire as well as wood, and in the 1950s it reworked the wire crate to be lighter and to take different bottles. It then took the name Rehrig Pacific Company, while still making steel-reinforced wooden cases. The third generation, Brad Rehrig, led the move into plastic: by the 1960s, the company says, it had taken up high-pressure injection molding and introduced its first plastic milk crate, the start of its change “from woodworkers to plastic manufacturers.”

From milk crates to pallets and carts.

Plastic took the company national. It says the dairy, beverage and baking trades were the first to adopt its injection-molded products, and that demand for milk cases led it to open a factory in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1968 to serve the eastern United States; the Erie newspaper the Erie Reader, in a profile of June 2015, dated the Erie operation to the early 1970s. Further plants followed, by the company’s timeline, in Atlanta in 1973, Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1980, Dallas in 1981, De Soto, Kansas, in 2000 and Orlando in 2005, with a new site announced for Buckeye, Arizona, in 2024.

The product range widened beyond crates. In 1992 the company introduced its Roll-Out Carts, the wheeled bins used for curbside collection, which brought it into municipal waste and recycling; its later timeline lists commercial waste containers in 2010 and container-tracking software for cities and waste haulers in 2012. In supply chains it makes plastic pallets, including a rackable pallet in the GMA grocery size that it launched in 2013, along with bakery trays, egg crates, totes, beverage crates and delivery lifts. From 2004, it says, customers also asked it to manage their reusable packaging, and it now presents itself as a provider of services and technology as well as products.

The press has documented some of that shift. In February 2014 the Los Angeles Business Journal described Rehrig Pacific as an East Los Angeles maker of plastic pallets, crates and containers with eight plants across the country, and reported a new program in which it delivered, collected and reused plastic beer and wine kegs made at its Los Angeles plant rather than only selling them. A company spokesman told the Erie Reader in 2015 that it had plants in Georgia, Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Florida and Querétaro, Mexico, and sales offices in Hong Kong, Brazil and the United Kingdom, and that it had won a contract to supply about half a million organic-waste bins to the city of Toronto. The Erie plant alone, he said, employed between 150 and 180 people and made products from milk crates and bakery trays to plastic pallets and municipal garbage and recycling bins.

Design and documentation.

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.

Four generations of one family.

Rehrig Pacific remains a family business by its own account. It describes a tradition spanning four generations and lists its values as “Family, Service, Growth, Intrapreneurship, and Innovation.” Its first leader from outside the family, it says, was Mike Doka, its fourth president, who oversaw its move into large-part molding and automated manufacturing. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported in 2014 that the founder’s great-grandson, also named Will Rehrig, was president; the company’s website now names him chief executive and a fourth-generation president, with Jeff Hentges as president.

The founder’s surname has stayed in the company name throughout. The company’s timeline reads as a list of material changes — wood, then steel wire, then plastic — and its products are named plainly for what they do, from roll-out carts to beverage crates. Its more recent launches lean on technology, with a delivery lift it introduced in 2021 and an image-recognition system for direct store delivery it launched in 2023, by its own timeline.

Its headquarters remain in Los Angeles, the city where the first wooden crates were made in 1913, according to the company and to the Erie Reader’s 2015 profile.

For a design guide, Rehrig Pacific shows how a family firm can carry one name through several changes of material. Compare ORBIS, another American maker of reusable plastic packaging, and CHEP, which pools pallets and containers. For this guide we use a crate blue and a pine amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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