I recently read a Forbes article about Jeffrey Owen, whose company, Lightning Technologies, is innovating the pallet industry.
Traditional wooden pallets can harbor bacteria, become contaminated, break, or catch fire easily.
Plastic pallets haven't replaced them because they cost three times as much and can't be easily fixed.
Lightning, on the other hand, uses a spray coating that keeps wooden pallets safer, cleaner, and more durable.
But the thing I found most profound is that Lightning builds value by stacking multiple innovations together into an unbeatable package.
Besides the coating, they also:
1. have active (vs. passive) ID chips installed in the pallet. While passive chips need to be scanned, the active chips beam information into the cloud automatically. This allows for intelligent, easily traceable supply chains.
2. The wood comes from fast-growing, sustainable forests.
3. Their manufacturing process has almost zero waste. Access sawdust is vacuumed up and sold for making more wood pellets, while extra spray is recirculated.
