Who ships tissue and paper towel, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships paper products

Named mills plus one head office. Georgia-Pacific alone runs 14 US production and converting facilities.

Ask for transportation procurement, and separately for the converting plant. Like pet food, this category buys freight centrally on annual bids. The converting plants also run their own short-haul outbound to distribution centres. Parent-roll movements between mill and converter are a third lane and often the least contested.

Where it hauls

Mills sit on fibre and water; converting plants sit near customers. Green Bay, Wisconsin is the single densest node in the country, with multiple mills in one city, and Marinette adds more up the shore. Beyond Wisconsin, mills and converting operations spread across the southeast, the Gulf and the Pacific Northwest. The mill makes parent rolls; the converting plant turns them into the packs that fill trailers. The producers to know:

How to open

The mill-to-converter parent roll lane is the detail that shows you know the business. Everyone pitches the finished goods; fewer notice that the rolls have to get there first.

Qualifying questions

• How does it load, and what does it scale? This is the extreme case of cube-out freight. A trailer packed to the roof with tissue can be under half of legal weight. Ask for the case or pallet count and stop thinking about tonnage.
• Parent rolls or finished goods? Parent rolls are enormous, heavy and need specific handling and blocking. Finished packs are light and palletized. Two entirely different loads out of the same complex, so establish which.
• Does the trailer need to be dry and clean? Paper absorbs everything: moisture, odour, contamination. A trailer that carried something aromatic will taint the load. Confirm what your prior load was before you take it.
• Is this contract or spot? Most tissue freight is contracted annually. Spot appears around demand shocks and plant changes. Knowing which you are quoting changes the whole conversation.
• Is there a mill-to-converter leg? Parent rolls move from mill to converting plant constantly and that lane gets less attention than finished goods. It is often the easier place to start.

When to call

Autumn, ahead of bid season. There is no seasonal peak to time, which is the appeal: the freight runs at the same rate in February and August and it does not care about weather. What it does care about is qualification, so the call that matters is the one before the RFP.