Gaylord guides
Eight short guides answer the questions buyers and sellers ask most: what a gaylord is, how much it holds, how grades work, when food can touch it and what a trip costs.
Start with the question you have
| You are asking | Read |
|---|---|
| What is a gaylord, anyway? | What is a gaylord box |
| How much can one hold? | Weight capacity by wall and bottom |
| How do I tell good from bad? | Grades, new to recycle only |
| Can it carry food? | Food contact |
| How many fit on a truck? | Per truckload |
| How do I flatten one? | Folding and knocking down |
| New or used? | The per-trip math |
| Why do prices differ? | What sets a price |
Each guide answers its question in the first sentence and shows its work after. Where a guide uses a number, it names the source and the date we last checked.
Why plain guides
The gaylord trade is full of shorthand. Dock crews say 3-wall and partial and KD and Grade B, and they mean precise things. Newcomers hear the words and guess. A buyer who guesses wrong orders a box that cannot carry the load or pays for strength the load never needed.
These guides use the trade's words correctly and explain each the first time. They do not use catalog numbers, because catalogs differ by maker. They do not state prices, because a price on a page is stale when the next truck pulls in. They do show arithmetic, because arithmetic does not go stale.
What you can do after reading
- Describe your load in a form-ready sentence: what, how heavy, how many, by when.
- Read a maker's rating without being fooled by it.
- Sort a stack of empties by grade in a minute per box.
- Run the cost per trip of new, single-trip and multi-trip boxes with your own quotes.
- Know when the answer is the baler.
Where to start if you are new to bulk boxes
Read the first guide, what a gaylord is, then the one on sizes. Together they take ten minutes and give you the vocabulary every quote uses: walls, bottom, footprint, grade. After that, pick the guide that matches the decision in front of you, whether that is price, truckload count, or reuse. Each one ends with a link to the request form, so you can ask the moment you know what to ask. Nothing on this site asks you to sign up, and none of the guides depends on buying from us.
How we write the guides
Every guide opens with its answer in the first sentence and shows its work after. Where a guide uses a number it names the source and the date we last reviewed it. Where we have no number we say so instead of rounding up. Where the trade disagrees with itself, for example on how many trips a used box makes, we say that too.
Questions people ask
Where do I start?
With "What is a gaylord box" if the word is new, or the per-trip math if you are comparing quotes.
Do you give prices?
No. The numbers in our calculator are the ones you type.
Who writes these?
The desk at Philly Gaylords, from sourced facts; every guide lists its sources and the date reviewed.
Sources
- Container Exchanger: the gaylord box guide, last reviewed November 11, 2026
- Bulk box, Wikipedia, last reviewed November 11, 2026