Rejuva

Industrial warehouse racking

Push-back racking

Push-back racking stores pallets several deep on nested carts that run back along inclined rails, so a lane holds far more than a single bay while still being loaded and picked from one aisle, and the truck never enters the lane. Rejuva designs, supplies and installs it across Europe.

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Push-back racking with pallets resting on inclined roller carts

The push-back principle

Each lane holds a set of nested rolling carts sitting on rails that slope gently towards the aisle. A pallet is placed on the front cart, and loading the next one pushes it back along the incline, which is where the name comes from. When a pallet is taken out, gravity brings the one behind it forward to the pick face on its own.

That makes push-back a last in, first out system, and it means a lane holds one line rather than a mixture. The gain over drive-in racking is that the truck stays in the aisle: there is no manoeuvring inside the structure, so both the handling time and the damage risk are lower.

Depth is a design choice, usually between two and six pallets, and each level of the same bay can be set up for a different line. That combination, several lines in one bay and several pallets in each lane, is what suits push-back to medium rotation stock that would waste the depth of a drive-in block.

What push-back racking gives you

  • Depth from a single aisle

    Pallets are stored several deep while the whole lane is served from the front, so the aisle count stays low without the truck ever entering the structure.

  • A line on every level

    Each lane holds one product, and a bay stacks several lanes, so a block of push-back can carry many more lines than a drive-in block of the same footprint.

  • The system does the retrieving

    The next pallet rolls forward under gravity when one is taken, so nothing has to be reached into the rack for and no pallet has to be shuffled to get at another.

  • Less damage to stock and steel

    Keeping the truck in the aisle removes the manoeuvre that causes most impact damage in dense systems, which shows up later in the repair bill.

  • Built around your pallet

    Cart size, lane depth and level pitch are set from the pallets you actually run, rather than the system being a fixed product you have to fit stock into.

Where push-back racking earns its place

Push-back suits palletised goods on medium rotation, held a few pallets deep per line rather than by the block.

  • Food and drink

    Where batches have to be kept together and product quality depends on the stock being worked in a controlled order.

  • Manufacturing

    Staged components and part-finished goods held close to the line, ready in the quantity a run consumes.

  • Distribution centres

    Density where floor is short, without giving up the ability to reach a wide range of lines from the same aisle.

What to check before specifying push-back

Push-back is a moving system, so the pallets have to be sound and consistent: a broken or badly loaded pallet on an inclined cart is a problem the same pallet would never cause on a static beam. Pallet quality is worth confirming during the survey rather than after the first jam.

The carts and rails also need to stay in the maintenance regime, alongside the frames themselves. Rejuva inspects racking against EN 15635 and repairs what the report finds, so the system that was designed on day one is still the system running in year five.

Racking is not only bought. It has to be installed to the design, inspected while it is in use, repaired when it is hit, and moved or sold when the operation changes.

Every system sits somewhere on one trade-off: selectivity, meaning you can reach any pallet at any time, against density, meaning how many pallets fit into the same floor area.

Have a project in mind?

Describe what needs to happen in the building and we will come back with a proposed approach, the specialist who would carry it out and a budget you can work with.

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