John Vaccaro remembers walking through his father’s soda factory watching bottles of soda of all flavors being filled and capped on a rolling assembly line, and placed into crates. Then his father would load the finished product into a truck, and drive to local bodegas throughout Brooklyn, chatting up owners, asking about their families and their business, and building a market for his locally made soda pop.
As the industry evolved, eventually local soda bottlers and their neighborhood-branded soda products were displaced by large beverage companies. So, the senior Vaccaro, sensing the need to pivot, changed along with it. Major beverage companies needed local distribution. And in an early nod to outsourcing, those beverage makers didn’t want the trucks themselves. They wanted a trusted partner to hire the drivers and operate trucks on their behalf, a partner for whom trucking and distribution was their core competency, who knew the area and knew the customers.
And with that Bettaway Beverage Distributors was born, with an initial fleet of one tractor trailer and two side- loader straight trucks doing beverage delivery. The focus was on beverage distribution, initially with Snapple as its first customer, serving the New York boroughs. That was 1983. Several years later, adding other start-up beverage businesses like Arizona Iced Tea, the trucking operation was expanded into a third-party logistics provider, and a new division was created – Bettaway Traffic Systems.
In the early 1990s, to address the emerging need for supply, maintenance and management of pallets Bettaway Pallet Systems was formed.
Bettaway is celebrating four decades of service as a local, family and woman-owned New Jersey business. No longer is it just a distributor of beverages. Today, after some half-dozen reinventions and expansions, adding related businesses such as dedicated warehousing and pallet supply, and jumping early into emerging market opportunities like packaging and fulfillment, Bettaway Supply Chain Services has become one of New Jersey’s leading integrated logistics, trucking, supply chain and pallet supply management companies.
The firm supports a wide range of beverage and other businesses with logistics, warehousing, order fulfillment and custom packaging, and transportation services across the Northeast. As it continued its journey of diversification, it won the business – and the trust of other major brands, including Monster Beverages, SOBE, Vitamin Water, and Body Armor, among others.
Later, other strategic partners came on board, including logistics industry titans such as C.H. Robinson. Coyote and Arrive; and PECO Pallets.
The company launched PalletTrader at the end of 2022, the industry’s first neutral, independent online site where pallet buyers and sellers can post their needs and their inventories, negotiate a price, complete a transaction and arrange transportation – all through one familiar e-commerce like process.
John Vaccaro, the company’s second-generation leader, along with his sisters Laura, June and Tracey, learned first-hand from their parents about anticipating customer needs and evolving with them – and how that would lead to growth and success. “Pallets is a good example,” he notes. “In the early ’90s there were no rental pallets and a poorly designed pallet exchange program. The market was ripe for innovation. So, we created a pallet retrieval and supply management program for beverage distributors. That expanded into providing all the pallets to the manufacturing facilities of our new age beverage customers.
