Tosca Brand Guidelines: From 1959 Cheese Barrels to a Pool of Reusable Food Crates

A dairy start and a long run of crates.

Tosca dates itself to 1959. FreightWaves reported in October 2019 that the company was founded that year when it refurbished cheese barrels for Kraft, and the company’s own timeline says it was founded for beer and cheese crates. The timeline’s next entry is a pool of 640 cheese boxes, built in 1994. In August 2012 the trade title Refrigerated Transporter described Tosca Limited as based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, serving companies that wanted to replace single-use packaging with reusable containers.

From the late 1990s the timeline moves through the food categories one container at a time. It lists a case-ready meat container in 1998, a potato shipper in 2000 and a beverage line in 2004. In 2006 came a reusable plastic container, or RPC, for produce and another for eggs, followed by a display pallet in 2013. By 2016, the company says, two of the five largest North American retailers were using its egg and case-ready meat RPCs.

The decisive change came in 2012. Refrigerated Transporter reported in August that year that Tosca had acquired the reusable plastic container division of Georgia-Pacific, known as GP RPC, expanding what it offered in the produce, dairy, beverage and protein industries. GP RPC’s staff joined Tosca, its three facilities in Memphis, Tennessee, Garland, Texas, and King City, California, stayed open, and the combined business was to trade under the Tosca brand. Eric Frank, who was to keep leading the Atlanta-based produce division, became Tosca’s president after the merger and its chief executive in 2016, according to the company.

Owned, washed and delivered.

Tosca sells a pooling service rather than packaging. The company says it owns, cleans, repairs and manages its reusables and delivers them when customers need them, so that users do not buy the assets themselves. ESG Today described the model in August 2026 as a pooling system of RPCs, pallets and bulk bins, with Tosca handling delivery, collection, sanitation and tracking for food producers, distributors and retailers.

Its range today is grouped by use rather than by product line. The company lists reusable crates, bulk containers and bins, heavy-duty plastic pallets and pallet dollies, and it presents separate pages for meat, poultry, eggs, cheese, produce, seafood and online grocery, along with non-food markets such as textiles and personal care. Its timeline lists a poultry crate in 2018, and its news pages describe reusable grocery totes introduced to US retailers in April 2020 as online grocery orders grew.

Newer launches follow the same pattern of one container for one food. The company’s timeline adds a seafood crate in 2022, a banana crate in 2023 and a rotisserie crate in 2024, and it says it has in-house research and development staff who adapt designs to customers’ supply chains. In 2019 FreightWaves put its workforce at 950 people, with 14 service centres in the United States.

The company’s news pages also show how it works with named customers. In May 2021 it announced that the poultry producer Fieldale Farms was pooling its poultry RPCs; in December 2022 it announced a partnership with Avery Dennison covering part of that company’s European supply chain; and in 2023 it published a case study of a foldable bin used for broccoli by Agromark, alongside a life-cycle analysis tool for companies shipping bulk liquids in foldable plastic intermediate bulk containers.

Pools, pallets and crates.

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.

Private equity and a move abroad.

Ownership has changed twice in a decade. Funds advised by Apax Partners acquired Tosca in 2017, FreightWaves and ESG Today report. In October 2019 FreightWaves reported that Tosca had agreed to acquire Polymer Logistics, a Netherlands-based maker of reusable packaging and retail display systems founded in 1994, with manufacturing in Israel and operations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe; Apax was to provide additional capital, and Polymer’s Cleanpal pallet division was to be spun out as a separate unit. A month earlier, the same report noted, the Reusable Packaging Association had given Polymer its 2019 Excellence in Reusable Packaging award for a Cleanpal pallet designed for Kroger to carry fresh eggs. The deal took Tosca into Europe, and the company’s timeline marks 2020 as the year “Tosca goes global.”

In August 2026 ESG Today reported that Goldman Sachs Alternatives had agreed to acquire Tosca from Apax, describing the company as Atlanta-based and serving food producers, distributors and retailers across North America and Europe; the transaction was expected to close in 2026. The website, run by Tosca Services, LLC, now appears in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish and Turkish.

For a design guide, Tosca shows how a packaging business can be organised around the food it carries rather than the container itself, with one crate for eggs, another for poultry and another for bananas. Compare Rehrig Pacific, another American maker of reusable plastic containers, and IFCO, which pools reusable produce crates. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm white and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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