When Rhody Transportation & Warehousing Inc. first built its enormous 125,000-square-foot warehouse in North Kingstown in 2001, Rhody President Steven Harrall had his doubts that it was the right move.
Back then Harrall looked across the vast room – the size of more than two football fields – with its 30-foot ceiling, and he thought: “Did we overbuild?”
In hindsight, he needn’t have been concerned.
The family-run company has found its warehousing space in demand, particularly at a time when companies looking to operate more efficiently are finding that in some cases it saves time and money to store raw goods and finished products at Rhody’s location in the Quonset Business Park.
Case in point: A large section of the Rhody warehouse is stacked nearly to the roof with row after towering row of new, unfilled soda cans manufactured by the Metal Container Corp. – a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch – in St. Louis.
The 8-ounce and 12-ounce cans are shipped to Rhode Island, and then delivered to bottling factories owned by Coca-Cola and Pepsi Co. in Cranston, Needham, Mass., and Londonderry, N.H., when needed.
Chris Tavares, Rhody’s general manager, says companies such as Metal Container Corp. have found that it is more efficient to continue to produce the cans and warehouse them near the bottling plants until they are needed instead of manufacturing them on demand.
“It reduces the lead time,” Tavares says.
For a company that got its start in trucking, Rhody says about 40 percent of its $5 million in annual revenue comes from storage fees.
Nevertheless, Rhody remains a transportation business at heart. It has a fleet of 15 tractors, 100 trailers, and more than a year ago, it entered the shipping-container business, delivering the trailer-sized cargo holders to various locations in the Northeast from ports in New York, New Jersey and Boston.
“It’s another leg to stand on,” says Tavares of the new revenue stream from the container business.
Warehousing and shipping containers weren’t in the plans of brothers Steven and Kenneth Harrall when they bought tiny Rhody Transportation in Johnston in 1977.
They had worked at their father’s trucking company before deciding they wanted to strike out on their own. In the early years, Steven Harrall recalls, they grew the business by snagging delivery jobs that weren’t profitable enough for the bigger companies, driving their own trucks on hauls within the state.
Things changed dramatically in 1991, when Rhody was hired by North Kingstown-based Toray Plastics (America) Inc. to store and transport resin to the factory in Quonset Business Park. “The problem was we were in Lincoln, and they were in North Kingstown,” Harrall says now.
Soon Toray, a Japanese-owned polypropylene film manufacturer, made it clear that it wanted the Harralls to move closer. “They didn’t want to wait three hours for their resin,” Harrall says.
At first, Rhody leased three buildings with a total of 130,000 square feet of storage in the Quonset area, included a former Electric Boat building. As Rhody continued to grow, the Harralls had to lease more space.
It got to be too unwieldy. “We had seven locations,” Steven Harrall says now. “It was insane. We had people everywhere.”
That’s when the Harralls decided to consolidate most of the locations and construct the warehouse on 10 acres on Callahan Road, a short distance from Toray.
Today, Toray remains Rhody’s biggest customer.
Rhody executives say it is to Toray’s and other client’s advantage to store products at Rhody’s building, instead of their own. “They don’t have to worry about managing the facility, administering it, inventorying it,” Steven Harrall says. “We do it for them.”In a tour of the warehouse, Tavares and Kevin McDonough, Rhody’s sales manager, say the facility stores everything from soda cans, plastic films and first aid, to 2-ton sacks of chickpeas that will eventually be used by a Massachusetts food manufacturer.
Because the soda cans are stored in the building, it must pass frequent cleanliness inspections. For that reason, Rhody uses special low-emission forklifts and there is little dust buildup.
“It’s forced us to take the level of this facility up a notch,” says Steven Harrall.•
COMPANY PROFILE
Rhody Transportation & Warehousing Inc.
OWNERS: Steven Harrall, president; Kenneth Harrall, vice president
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Trucking and warehousing company
LOCATION: 600 Callahan Road, North Kingstown
EMPLOYEES: 38
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1977
ANNUAL SALES: About $5 million
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