Schoeller Allibert Brand Guidelines: The Crate Maker That Became IPL Schoeller in 2025

A German family business and a French plastics maker.

Schoeller Allibert is a young name for an old trade. It appeared in January 2013, when two reusable-packaging makers, Schoeller Arca Systems and LINPAC Allibert, were rebranded as one company. Warehouse News reported in February 2013 that the investor One Equity Partners, already the controlling shareholder in Schoeller Arca Systems, had bought LINPAC Allibert in March 2012, and that the two had run as sister companies until the new name was adopted. The other shareholder named at the time was Schoeller Industries, the holding company of the German Schoeller family.

Each half was itself the product of earlier deals. Logistics Business described the company in 2025 as the amalgamation of eight plastic pallet and container businesses brought together over a couple of decades. On the Schoeller side, it listed the Dutch business Wavin Systems; the Swedish companies Perstorp Plastic Systems and Arca Systems, the latter acquired in 2005. On the Allibert side, the French plastics maker Allibert had joined the American container maker Buckhorn, and then in 2007 merged with the British firm Linpac Materials Handling, which had already absorbed Paxton, to become LINPAC Allibert.

The Schoeller family connection is the longer thread. German Wikipedia says that Alexander Schoeller, of the industrial family from the Düren area, turned to making wooden and later plastic packaging and built a first packaging factory, and that from 1982 his sons Martin and Christoph Schoeller developed it into an international holding based in Pullach, near Munich. The company’s later history page dates the start of its reusable-packaging story to 1958, with what it calls the first plastic beverage crate.

Crates, foldable boxes and pallets.

Schoeller Allibert made returnable transport packaging: plastic boxes, crates and pallets designed to be used again and again rather than thrown away after one trip. At the time of the 2013 rebrand, Warehouse News described its range as foldable large and small containers, bulk containers, plastic pallets, stackable and nesting crates, dollies and lids, and named three products: the Maxinest tray, the Maxipac bulk unit and the Magnum Optimum foldable large container. The company also offered systems made to order for particular customers and industries, the same report said.

German Wikipedia gives a similar picture of the standard range, adding beverage crates, transport trolleys and UN-certified pails, and says the business served the automotive, beverage and food industries as well as retail, industry and services. When the merger with IPL was announced in April 2025, the Irish broadcaster RTÉ reported that Schoeller Allibert served customers in sectors including automotive, beverage, food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, retail and material handling, mainly in Continental Europe.

The company’s footprint changed over the period. In 2013 Warehouse News said it had more than 40 production and sales operations across Europe, the Americas and Asia, with headquarters in the Netherlands. By 2025, RTÉ reported, it had about 1,600 employees across 11 production locations. German Wikipedia names the parent as Schoeller Packaging B.V., based at Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam, and places the German company, Schoeller Allibert GmbH, in Schwerin, with further offices in Monheim and Pullach.

Some product names outlived the company. The Magnum Optimum is still listed by IPL Schoeller among its foldable large containers, and IPL Schoeller’s news pages say the Magnum Optimum 1208 was recognised in Italy’s Conai packaging award in 2020.

Pools, crates and returnable packaging.

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 One Equity Partners to Brookfield, then into IPL Schoeller.

The shareholders changed again five years after the rebrand. On 15 May 2018 Brookfield Business Partners, with institutional partners, announced that it had completed the purchase of a controlling interest in Schoeller Allibert Group B.V., in partnership with the Schoeller Group, which it called one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of returnable plastic packaging systems. In November 2023 the European Commission cleared the acquisition of sole control of Schoeller Packaging Holding B.V., the Schoeller Allibert parent, by Brookfield Corporation, under its simplified merger procedure.

In April 2025 the Dublin-based rigid-plastics maker IPL agreed to merge with Schoeller Allibert, RTÉ reported, with the combined business to be headquartered in Dublin and led by IPL’s chief executive, Alan Walsh. The merger was completed on 1 July 2025, according to the law firm Torys, which acted for Brookfield, and the combined company took a new brand, IPL Schoeller. Former IPL shareholders, funds managed by Madison Dearborn Partners and CDPQ, own 55%; the Schoeller Allibert shareholders, Brookfield’s private equity business and the Schoeller family, own the remaining 45%, Torys said. IPL Schoeller said it had 26 manufacturing locations across North America, Continental Europe and the United Kingdom, and more than 4,000 employees.

That means Schoeller Allibert no longer trades under its own name as an independent company. The IPL Schoeller history page says Schoeller Allibert was created through a series of mergers between 1960 and 2012, and that “IPL Schoeller was created in 2025 through the merger of IPL and Schoeller Allibert.” Several of the old product names, including the Magnum Optimum, now appear under the IPL Schoeller banner.

For a design guide, Schoeller Allibert shows how a merged company’s name can carry both of its founders’ identities, and how that name can itself be folded into a larger one. Compare Cabka, another European maker of plastic pallets, and ORBIS, a reusable-packaging maker in the United States. For this guide we use a deep teal, a dark slate and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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