Founder Sonny Costin Retiring from CC Racks

Chris Beytes

It’s been 20 years since Sonny Costin noticed loads of random grower racks behind a big-box store and thought, “That industry needs a pool system.”

Sonny, who had been working for years for CHEP, the blue pallet people, was an expert in the topic of supply chain logistics. Some research, and some communication with the Container Centralen (CC) folks in Europe, and Sonny had set up CC here in America to provide the same kind of supply chain logistics for growers that CC Europe had been doing for 50 years.

That was in 2004; today, CC Racks, a division of Container Centralen, based out of Winter Garden, Florida, has some 850,000 shipping racks in their pool. Their racks ship to 25,000 retailers in 48 states and Canada, and they do asset tracking, logistics and rack recovery for growers, along with renting racks to meet year-round or seasonal needs.

Sonny had decided it’s time to go on to the next big thing, as well as spend time back in his home country of Australia, so he’s retiring from his role as president/CEO in September. Taking his place will be current VP of Operations John Paulsen, a 15-year veteran of the company.

Said Sonny in a note about his pending retirement, “We have some exciting projects underway, including use of artificial intelligence to predict rack recovery from retail locations, so that CC and our customers can achieve improved efficiency on this key element of rack operation. There’s so much more to achieve and we have a great team in place to carry the business forward over the coming years.” GT