Who grades
your totes.
Your enquiry will be read by a grader or the operations lead. That is why the reply has numbers in it.
Thirty-four people, twenty-three of them on the yard or the line, and nobody who assigns a grade carries a sales target. That separation is the single most important structural thing about this company: a grader who can be leaned on destroys the only product we actually sell, which is a claim you can rely on.
Why grading is not a trainee job
The 27-point checklist takes a week to memorise. Reading it takes months. Stress crazing at a lower bottle corner under yard light looks like a scuff until you have seen forty of them. Judging whether a racked cage will come back on a jig or whether it is scrap is a feel for how the tube has yielded, not a measurement. An interior odour that means “wash it again” and one that means “this never goes near food” are distinguishable but not describable.
So we pair new graders for about four months before they work alone, and we accept that this makes hiring slow. The alternative is a grade standard that is a document rather than a practice.
The separation that matters
Graders report to operations. The commercial side can ask what is available and cannot ask for a grade to be reconsidered. If a customer needs twelve food-grade units and we have eight, the answer is eight plus a lead time — not eleven and an optimistic view of a data plate.
This costs us orders. It is also why fleet customers stay for years and why our five-day inspection window almost never gets used.
Headcount
- Graders
- 4
- Wash line
- 5
- Rebottling
- 3
- Fabrication
- 4
- Yard & dispatch
- 7
- Office
- 11
- Total
- 34
Hiring
We hire for stubbornness over speed on the pad and for curiosity in the fabrication shop. Open roles carry published pay bands.
Open rolesWho does what
Graders · 4
The 27-point inspection, prior-contents transcription, data plate photography and the routing decision for every container that enters the gate. Four months of paired training before anyone grades alone. They report to operations and carry no commercial target, deliberately.
Wash-line operators · 5
Cycle selection by residue class, caustic concentration and temperature control, separator maintenance, pH verification and certificate generation. They are the people whose logs become the document your food-safety auditor reads.
Rebottling technicians · 3
Teardown, weld and geometry inspection, jig straightening, blast and recoat, bottle fitting. They are also the people who reject one cage in seven, which takes a certain stubbornness when there is an order waiting.
Fabricators · 4
Heated-blade cutting, bulkhead fitting, manifold plumbing, welding in reclaimed cage tube, TIG and passivation on stainless. Also the people who look at a sketch on a napkin and come back with a dimensioned drawing.
Yard and dispatch · 7
Intake weighing, staging, load securement, outbound dispatch and the backhaul routing that makes our buyback freight viable. Three hold CDLs and run our own short-haul collections.
Operations and commercial · 11
Quoting, programme management, scheduling, accounts and the diversion reporting. Everyone here has spent time on the grading pad, which is the only reason the quotes are any good.
Crew questions
Who actually assigns the grade on my tote?
One of four trained graders, by hand, on the pad. Grading is never done by a trainee working alone and never by anyone with a sales target, because a grader who can be leaned on to call a technical unit Grade A destroys the only thing we sell. Graders report to operations, not to the commercial side.
How long does it take to train a grader?
About four months of paired work before anyone grades alone. The 27 points take a week to memorise and months to actually see — reading stress crazing at a lower corner under yard light, or judging whether a cage will come back on a jig, is pattern recognition you cannot get from a checklist.
Who answers my email?
A grader or the operations lead, not a call centre. That is why the answer sometimes takes until the end of the day and why it usually contains a number rather than a brochure. There are eleven people in the office and all of them have spent time on the pad.
Your email reaches a grader
Not a call centre. That is why replies sometimes take until end of day and usually contain a number.