Inside Ollie Pets’ Innovative Shift to Reusable Transport Packaging

Ollie Pets is redefining what fresh pet food looks like—and bringing that same innovation to their operations. Learn how the Ollie team partnered with Tosca to replace corrugate with reusable transport packaging, unlocking efficiency, safety, and sustainability across their supply chain.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Brockhoff, Director, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, Ollie: At Ollie, we’re taking a fresh approach to pet nutrition. We’re trying to take that same approach to the business to the way that we operate. Part of that is moving away from that old model of corrugate master cases to something new and innovative.

[00:00:17] Michael Davis, Customer Success Manager, Tosca: Ed’s big concern when he contacted us was to improve the quality of the product that they received from their manufacturer.

They had experienced crushed boxes and tipped over loads, and they wanted to make an improvement, and they also wanted to improve the throughput through their facility/

[00:00:32] Ed Brockhoff: We were bringing a lot of frozen product in the old fashioned corrugate boxes, which as you can imagine, involves a lot of breaking down at the end of the shift.

So we’re trying to look at something that was gonna be more sustain. For us as we grew and it was also gonna be easier and safer in our facilities for our staff. And I thought it would be a, a difficult transition and it wasn’t. It was a really easy transition.

Tosca’s not only willing to work directly with the upstream vendors, I think they actually really enjoy it. They know how important our partnership is with our vendors. And they’re very respectful of that, and they work hand in hand with those vendors to, to bring them on board this, this new process.

[00:01:18] Eric Dougherty, General Manager ILFC, Ollie: Once the product was introduced, the transition was pretty seamless for the most part.

With corrugated, they had to break them down. They had to stack them up. It’s very awkward to haul around like stacks of them with these so they can move them around without any issues whatsoever, carry them distances and things without having any kind of strain or any kind of risk of, of possible injury.

One of the great advantages to Tosca is that they are open on, on the outside, so it allows for air flow. So when we put them in our freezer, it helps ensure that they stay cold by having the freezing air blowing through them and then maintain temperature.

[00:01:54] Ed Brockhoff: We have a, a big focus on sustainability at Ollie, one thing we’re trying to do is, is reduce our use of packaging. One really cool thing with Tosca is that they’re very open to suggestions and to opportunities for further partnership. So we’ve actually started up a, a project with one of our packaging vendors and Tosca quite recently, where we’re exploring can we design a new RPC for a particular purpose for a particular product pet food space.

Especially for high-quality dog food is growing exponentially, and the needs of our customers and customers in the general industry are growing and are also changing. And part of that is not only high-quality dog food that’s gonna give you the dog the happiest and healthiest of lives, it’s also ensuring that the company that you’re partnering with is looking out for the environment, looking out for the planet, and for the future of everyone — dogs and humans included.