Start the conversation
Same form, every page. Tell us once — we route it to whoever's closest to your tote.
Year by year, tote by tote.
- 2007
Two friends, one pickup truck.
Mike (industrial logistics) and Andre (homebrewer) start hauling empty 275s out of a Lansing brewery once a week. They sell the clean ones to a tomato processor in Toledo for a hundred dollars each.
- 2009
First leased yard in Battle Creek.
Quarter-acre fenced lot. We add a steam pressure-washer and an indoor inspection bay so we can buy tanks that aren't already clean.
- 2012
First reconditioning certification.
We become formally trained in tri-stage caustic-hot-potable washes. From here on we can grade and sell food-contact totes, not just clean industrial.
- 2015
Move to Grand Rapids.
Outgrowing Battle Creek, we lease the back lot at 902 Scribner Ave NW. Two acres, drive-through pickup, indoor processing.
- 2018
Buy the Scribner property outright.
Four acres total, second wash bay, overhead crane. We start shipping into Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin.
- 2021
First custom-build line.
Customers keep asking for cut, capped, lidded totes. We add a fabrication corner. Rain catchers, planter caddies, mash tuns.
- 2024
250,000 tanks rescued.
Cumulative landfill diversion crosses 36 million pounds of HDPE — about the curb weight of 9,000 SUVs.
- 2026
Where you found us.
Same family-owned shop, same yard, same answer to every email — within one business day.
Want to see the next year?
We're hiring drivers and adding a third wash bay in late 2026. Tag along, send us a tote, or just say hi.
What 2007–2017 was actually like.
The official timeline lists milestones. The lived version had a lot more wrong turns. Worth telling, if only so the next person who tries this kind of business knows what they're signing up for.
The first six months were a pickup truck and a flip phone. We didn't have a wash bay. We had a garden hose and a chemical sprayer. The first customer paid us $48 a tank, and that included our markup. We thought we were getting rich.
The second year we leased a quarter acre in Battle Creek, $1,200 a month, fenced gravel. We bought a used steam pressure washer at auction for $4,300. That was the entire capital expenditure of the first three years. By the end of year three we had paid ourselves a combined $32,000.
The first hire was Marcus, in 2011. He answered our want-ad on a coffee shop bulletin board and worked with us for four years before moving to Colorado. He was the one who built our first chain-of-custody system on index cards in a metal recipe box. The cards are still in a drawer at the yard.
Year five was the breakthrough. Andre took a three-day workshop on tri-stage reconditioning at a packaging trade event in Cincinnati. He came home with a notebook of process notes and a conviction that we were leaving food-grade money on the table because we couldn't certify our wash. Six months later we'd built our first proper caustic-rinse setup and shipped our first formally Grade A tank.
The slow part was getting buyers to trust the grade. The reconditioning industry in 2012 had a reputation problem — too many operators calling things food grade that weren't. We spent two years sending free sample tanks to copackers and brewing associations before our first Grade A repeat customer materialized. That patience is the part of the story nobody writes about.
The mistakes we'd make differently in hindsight.
Moving the yard in 2015 was the biggest call we ever made.
By late 2014 we had outgrown Battle Creek. We were stacking tanks on the access road. We were turning away customers because we couldn't fit them in the queue. The choice was clear in retrospect: move or stagnate. It was less clear at the time.
We looked at six properties across Michigan in early 2015. The Scribner Ave NW lot in Grand Rapids was four acres, drive-through accessible, and sat on the right freight corridor. It was also $4,800/month — four times what we'd been paying in Battle Creek.
The cost math wasn't certain. We projected we could double our throughput inside three years, which would cover the rent delta plus the move costs plus the second wash bay we needed to build. The reality was faster — we passed the breakeven in 17 months because the new yard let us take on customers we'd been turning away.
The lesson: the right yard is the one your freight corridor wants. Cheap rent in the wrong place is expensive over years.
“We could have stayed in Battle Creek. We'd be a smaller, more comfortable business. Moving was the call that turned this into the company we wanted to run.”
— Mike Tarsis, co-founder
What 'now' actually looks like at the yard.
Eleven people on payroll. Two wash bays running near full capacity Monday through Friday. A fabrication corner that turns out 12-18 custom builds a month. Outbound trailers leaving Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. About 14,800 tanks moving through the yard in a typical year — up from 4,200 in 2014.
The customer mix has gradually shifted. In 2014 we were 70% as-is used and 25% reconditioned. Today we're 55% reconditioned, 35% as-is, 10% custom builds and accessories. The reconditioned shift reflects the rising sophistication of buyers around chain-of-custody documentation — and the FDA's 2021 draft guidance giving permission for formal food-contact reuse.
We've added customers across eight states. Our consolidation network now reaches roughly 200 partner facilities. Our per-tank freight cost has dropped from $19.10 in 2021 to $11.85 in 2024 — same trucks, same fuel prices, better routing.