GMA pallets are “four-way” accessible 48”x40” pallets developed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (now called the Consumer Brands Association) way back in the early 1900s. This same organization developed the UPC (Universal Product Code) in the 1970s.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association understood the importance of standardizing a good pallet specification as port of their industry’s best practices. Since then, the GMA pallet has been adopted by many other industries.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) lists the GMA pallet as one of its six accepted standard types of pallets for use throughout the world and notes it wastes the least amount of floor space (less than 4%) of all pallet sizes when loaded in an ISO standard container.

In our next blog post, we’ll take a look at common pallet sizes in the U.S.