Pick too small and you are running extra trips. Pick too large and you are paying for space you will never fill. Pallet capacity is one of the most practical decisions in cold fleet planning, and one of the most commonly miscalculated.
This guide walks through how to match vehicle size to your actual run requirements, what to account for when your volumes fluctuate, and why getting this right from the start saves you time, money, and a lot of mid-contract frustration.
Why pallet capacity gets miscalculated
Most fleet sizing decisions are made on one of two pieces of evidence: last year’s invoices, or the operator’s best guess at peak demand. Both miss what matters most.
Last year’s invoices tell you what you carried, not what you turned away. Peak-demand thinking, on the other hand, often oversizes a fleet by anchoring on a single busy fortnight a year. Neither view gives you a clean read on what your fleet actually needs to do, day in and day out.
The miscalculations we see most often are:
- Sizing to peak, leaving a large truck running half-empty for 10 months of the year
- Sizing to average, then constantly running second runs in peak season
- Sizing to last year, when the business has grown 20 percent since
- Sizing to the truck a competitor uses, without knowing their actual run profile
How do you work out the capacity you actually need?
Start with the run, not the vehicle. Map a typical week of deliveries and capture three things for each run:
- Pallets or equivalent volume on the truck at its fullest point in the run
- Number of drops and the time window each one must hit
- Total kilometres per run and per week
From there, the right pallet capacity is the one that handles your typical run comfortably with about 10 to 15 percent headroom for growth and small variation. If your fullest point in a typical run sits at six pallets, an 8-pallet truck is usually the right call, not a 10-pallet.
Headroom matters because cold loads rarely sit perfectly. Pallets get reshuffled, returns ride home, and last-minute add-ons turn a 6-pallet run into a 7-pallet run quickly.
What happens when your volumes fluctuate?
Almost every food service, pharmaceutical, and catering business deals with seasonal or event-driven peaks. The wrong response is to size the entire fleet to that peak. The right response is to build a base fleet that handles the everyday, then flex up when the peak arrives.
This is one of the strongest cases for long-term refrigerated truck rental. A 6-pallet truck on long-term rental can cover your everyday, and a larger 10-pallet or 14-pallet rental can be added short term for your peak weeks, then handed back. Rental agreements at Eurocold include servicing, registration, insurance, 24/7 roadside support, and Vision Trak telematics, so adding capacity does not also mean adding overhead.
If your volumes have grown structurally rather than seasonally, the long-term benefits of long-term rental are worth weighing against committing capital to a vehicle you may outgrow again in two years.
The pallet range from 2 to 14, and what each size suits
Across our refrigerated range, the practical guide for matching size to operation looks like this:
- 2-pallet utes and vans: high-frequency urban runs, parcels and part-pallets, drivable on a car licence
- 2-pallet to 4-pallet trucks: small food service distributors, caterers, florists, pharmacy couriers
- 6-pallet to 8-pallet trucks: mid-sized food service, regional routes, businesses outgrowing van-based delivery
- 10-pallet to 12-pallet trucks: larger food service operators, multi-drop wholesale, scaled meal-prep operations
- 14-pallet jumbo trucks: high-volume distributors, interstate work, long-haul cold chain
For operations at the largest end, our 14 Pallet Safety Edition is purpose-built for high-volume cold work with Euro 6 compliance, ADAS, fatigue monitoring, and a payload of 11,495kg.
Getting it right before you commit
The most common message we hear from operators reviewing their fleet is some version of, “We outgrew it faster than we expected.” The second most common is, “We never use the top quarter of the truck.” Both are sizing errors, and both are avoidable.
Before you commit to a vehicle, run the numbers above against your real operation. Then check what a long-term rental looks like at one size up and one size down. Sometimes the better answer is not the truck you had in mind.
Talk through your fleet sizing with our team
If you would rather sense-check your sizing with someone who has watched a lot of cold fleets get this right and wrong, we are happy to help. Call 1300 222 323 or email [email protected], and we will walk through your run profile with you.