Our Mission
To be recognized as a valuable business partner to our clients, engaged in our community, and an innovative leader within our industry. We will provide a unified commitment to communication, exceptional services, and relationship building both within our team and our clients, existing and new.
Experience. Knowledge. Passion.
Behnke Warehousing Inc., established in 1926, began with a firm foundation in logistics and storage. Since then we’ve evolved to meet the needs of our clients, build our brand reputation, and serve the Battle Creek area for almost 100 years! Behnke Warehousing Inc. provides trucking logistic solutions, warehousing and semi-trailer storage, intramodal and intermodal shipping, and much more. We are invested in the needs of our clients and strive to exceed them.
• Over 1.2 million square feet of storage space ranging from buildings of five thousand square feet to buildings as large as two hundred thousand square feet
• Robust trucking operation servicing clients as far away as California and local manufacturers in the Battle Creek.
• With a fleet of ten trucks and over two hundred and fifty trailers, we provide mobile storage needs quickly.
• We have forklifts for heavy machinery and also a fleet that can handle twenty truckloads a day.
• In 2009 BWI added a hazardous storage facility to store paint for a client in the automotive industry.
• Behnke’s main complex is situated on the Canadian National Railroad. The railroad is utilized for trans-load operation, unloading trucks, and delivering clients product within the same day the car is received in to our facility.
• In 2011 BWI ventured into cold storage, storing and distributing raisins for the cereal industry.
OUR HISTORY:
In 1926, our Patriarch Carl H. Behnke, (a mover by trade) arrived at a local paper mill to unload his back haul of paper out of Chicago. The paper mill informed him they do not have the room to unload his truckload of paper and to come back the next day. Mr. Behnke had to move an officer from Camp Fort Custer the next day, so he had to get his trailer empty. To no avail he could not get it unloaded, so he decided to unload the load of paper in his little storage building he had for his truck. The paper company inquired to Behnke if he could build him a storage building (warehouse) and from that five thousand square foot building came forty-one more. BWI1To date we still have the same paper company as a client, that’s pushing ninety years! Carl got tired of moving people all over the United States and focused more on storage buildings. He purchased the old Battle Creek landfill and started building thirty thousand square foot buildings. This site was located on the east side of Battle Creek, right next to the cereal companies and the rail yards. It was either beginners luck or just hard work pays off for Behnke because the cereal companies loved the idea of storing their raw materials and excess inventory in BWI buildings. In 1973 Behnke purchased the “Oliver Farm Machinery” manufacturing site from Michigan State University. Friends, clients and local bankers thought Carl was “nuts” to redevelop a site that sat vacant for twenty plus years. Nevertheless, Behnke took to task to develop over one hundred thousand square feet of storage space from a local eyesore. Most people think of retirement at age 65, but Behnke loved to work and make something of nothing, in which he accomplished. In the late seventies came high interest rates and it was tough to pay down debt with interest rates above twenty percent. Behnke befriended local lending institutions through his revitalization of the Oliver site and was approached by the banks with repossessed industrial manufacturing site. Behnke purchase some seven foreclosed manufacturing facilities in and around Battle Creek and refurbished them in to “like new” storage facilities. To date, BWI has some forty one buildings around the City of Battle Creek encompassing over a million square feet. The company now is in it’s third generation of family management and we still abide by our founders principles that hard work brings good luck and we are lucky/fortunate to have some of the same customers for eighty nine years!