This is the question we are asked most often by food and pharmaceutical customers, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a reassuring one. Wooden pallets are standard throughout grocery distribution; they are also not appropriate everywhere, and the boundary is worth drawing precisely.
What the research broadly shows
Wood's porosity cuts both ways. It can absorb contamination into the surface, and it also draws moisture away from the surface, which is unfavourable to bacterial survival. Studies comparing wood and plastic cutting surfaces have repeatedly produced results that surprise people who expected plastic to win outright.
What is not in dispute: a dry, clean, undamaged wooden deck is a low-risk surface, and a damp or mouldy one is not. Dryness is the whole game.
What we can actually do
- Grade out anything damp, mouldy, stained or chemically marked — these never enter a food lane.
- Store and dispatch exclusively from covered bays for food customers.
- Heat-treat, which reduces surface microbial load as a side effect of the phytosanitary process.
- Supply new material where a specification requires documented new wood.
- Spot-check moisture on dispatch samples, daily in winter.
What we cannot do
We cannot sanitise a wooden pallet to a validated standard the way an autoclave or a tote washer can. We cannot guarantee a sterile surface. And we cannot make a wooden pallet suitable for a washdown zone, because the washdown itself is the problem: water and wood are a poor combination by design.
Where the boundary falls
Wood for transport, storage and distribution, including inside most food DCs. Plastic inside sanitary zones, in direct contact with unpackaged product, and anywhere requiring validated cleaning between uses. A transfer-pallet programme at the zone boundary handles the handover, and it is a great deal cheaper than converting an entire estate to plastic.
We have talked three food customers out of a full plastic conversion by proposing a transfer programme at the zone boundary instead. All three still run wood everywhere upstream.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on April 14, 2026. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- April 14, 2026
- Category
- Safety
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “Pallet hygiene: what cleaning a wooden pallet can and cannot do”, Repallet Shop, April 14, 2026. repalletshop.com/blog/pallet-hygiene-what-cleaning-can-do