Field note · July 2026

Nobody Builds for the Recall

A company spends years building a supply chain that moves in exactly one direction: out. Factory to distributor, distributor to shelf, shelf to customer. Every dollar of logistics spend assumes the product keeps moving forward. Then one morning a regulator says stop, and forty thousand units have to travel the other way, back through a system that was never built to run in reverse.

That is the moment the gap becomes visible. The company has warehousing. It has none that is certified to quarantine recalled product, segregate it from sellable inventory, and hold it under a chain of custody a regulator will later ask to see. Those are different buildings, different certifications, different people. Most companies discover this the week they need it, which is the worst possible week to discover anything.

The relationship that saves a recall should have existed a year before the recall. It almost never does.

The reason is boring and human. Nobody keeps a reverse-logistics warehouse on retainer for a failure they do not believe will happen. Optimism is free until it isn’t. So the capability that looks obvious in hindsight sits unbuilt, and the scramble starts from zero every single time.

That scramble is the market. Not the warehousing itself, but the matching of a company in acute need to the operator who already does this work, before the returns pile up in a parking lot. The introduction is the leverage, because it collapses two weeks of panicked searching into one call.

We do not run a warehouse. We know which ones can actually do the work, and we get you in the room while it still matters.

— Yassine Zerhouni routes between companies in recall and the operators who clean it up.