A Melbourne-based company which is one of Australia’s largest makers of food boxes for fresh produce has begun buying Scania rigid trucks to transport its expanded polystyrene food boxes, because its previous Japanese supplier ceased to offer a suitable truck.
Polyfoam Australia says that while its products are not quite lighter than air, they would most likely be amongst the lightest cargo by weight, while being the largest by volume transported across the big brown land.
The company turned 40 years old in 2025 and is owned and run by Bruce and Simon Pickett, manufacturing the food boxes for fresh produce and somewhat ironically for ready-made weight-loss meals, at its plants in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and two factories in Tasmania, which particularly supports the local salmon export industry.
Bruce Pickett and Polyfoam’s general manager Nick Tandy turned to Scania around five years ago to begin supplying, and Nick wanted a truck that would not blow over in the wind. Yes, you read that correctly.
“Our product is so light, that even a fully loaded 14-pallet rigid or 24 pallet drop-deck semi-trailer would not add even a tonne to the total mass of the combination,” Tandy said.
“But with a height of 4.3 m and around nine metres long the curtain sider becomes a huge sail in a side wind, especially when traversing Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge,” he said.
“What we needed was a lightweight truck that could be stable on the road when it’s loaded and unloaded, because we often have no backload,” Tandy said.
The company began with one Scania P 280 rigid, with subsequent rigid acquisitions shifting up to the P 320 specification, towing single axle pig trailers, to maximise the volume of product delivered per journey.
Polyfoam later addd two G 450 prime movers along with the Vawdrey curtainsiders for larger deliveries when access isn’t a problem.
“From the start everybody loved the Scania, the cabin layout, the access, the simplicity of the vehicle to operate, and it was great to drive,” explained company founder, Bruce Pickett, who still drives occasionally.
“We now have three rigids and two prime movers in Victoria, one Scania prime mover in Bridgewater in Tasmania, one rigid in Westbury in Tasmania at our new factory, and in Queensland we’ve got six rigids in service and two more on order,” he said
” We’re also introducing Scania to our NSW operation with two going in there, and there will be a new prime mover for Westbury as well,” Pickett added.
“From our base in Dandenong South we deliver all over Victoria, from Portland to Bairnsdale and up to Shepparton,” Tandy said.
“We tend not to go interstate, as we have factories in most states, so it is all intrastate running,” he added.
“The Victorian trucks will clock up on average 100,000 km annually, though in Queensland we have been up around 200,000 km per year, due to the longer distances.
“We’re pleased to see that the Scanias are returning better fuel efficiency than our older trucks, even though the payload is so light. It all adds up to savings we can bank.
We’ll probably turn these over at a million km, but they will have had a relatively easy life, of course, although the rigids do deliveries to farms and also to building sites, so they’re often on poor roads and dirt,” he said.
“We have the Scanias on contracted repair and maintenance programmes, so we know exactly what our monthly servicing costs are going to be, so it’s one predictable element in a business where other costs are less predictable, such as the raw materials for the foam products, which are tiny plastic granules.
“We import the granules from all over the world and then subject them to steam which fluffs them up. They then sit for a while to stabilise and are then poured into a mould and steamed a second time to fuse them into shape,” Nick explains.
“As a business we’re constantly looking for efficiencies, just like Scania. We try all sorts of ways to shave a few grams or fractions of a gram of base stock out of the design, and we have updated European machinery that can now mould multiple boxes at a time rather than just one.
“You might think ‘what’s a one gram saving?’, but we use 100 tonnes or more each month. That one-gram saving could add up to significant savings each month. Same with the trucks, if you can cut your running costs, say a couple of hundred dollars per truck per week, it adds up.
“Our boxes have to be strong, so they are as wide at the top as the bottom, which means we can’t nest them and therefore transport more product in a given space. The boxes for the fish weigh 25 kg when full of salmon and ice, and they’re often stacked 10 high, so the box at the bottom is supporting 250 kg,” Nick says. “This is important for our customers, as they need to get the most amount of product in the smallest space to keen their export transport costs to a minimum.
“We sell to all the major salmon farmers in Tasmania, who need a robust, leak-free container that will keep their produce fresh. The boxes meet the Australian standard for seafood airfreight approval, which means they won’t leak seawater in the plane.
“Our polystyrene boxes are vital for produce such as broccoli. As soon as the broccoli is cut from the ground it goes into shock, a bit like table grapes, and if it is not refrigerated straight away, it starts to turn yellow, and the taste becomes bitter. So, our boxes are there to receive the broccoli fresh from the field or the cool room, and they get transported to the markets in the best possible condition thereby reducing food wastage.
“Another element to the expanded polystyrene is that is it fully recyclable. We take in up to nine tonnes a week and grind it up back into tiny pellets to be reused, with some virgin stock, and we make the recycled material into polystyrene pallets on which we place our product for transport, or waffle pods for construction. Our plastic pallets often weigh more than the load that is strapped to them,” Nick says.
“We say that our polystyrene product is more economical to recycle than cardboard, because polystyrene products come back, are ground up and are then ready to reuse.
“We have had a very good relationship with Scania from the start,” Tandy said.
“Roger Lake is our Scania account manager, and he has a good relationship with our owner Bruce Pickett, and we speak to Roger quite regularly.
“He keeps in touch and looks after us and last year he forewarned us about an impending price change, so we were able to order six trucks before the price went up which saved us a lot of money, so I’m very impressed with the proactive service from Scania,” Tandy concluded
