Caine Transfer Inc / Mack & Volvo Trucks

Just Like Family

How Kriete Truck Centers earned a place inside a 75-year-old family trucking business — one Mack, one phone call, one on-time delivery at a time.

He was seventeen, and he had just parked his first Mack in the door yard.

A B-model. He had walked the whole lot looking at trucks, weighing the choice, and he kept coming back to that one. Kept walking with that Mack. “I got to have that Mack,” he decided. When it was finally his, he drove it home and left it where his father would see it.

His father was Chester Caine Sr. — a World War I veteran, not a man who handed out sentiment. He came out to the door yard, looked at the truck, and stopped.

"I thought I’d never see another Mack Bulldog."

The Bulldog had followed him home from France. Mack trucks hauled for the Allies in the First World War, and the soldiers named them after the bulldog — because they were tough, because they didn’t quit, because they got done what needed to be done. Chester Sr. had known them a world away, in the worst year of his life. Now one sat in his own door yard, bought by his teenage son.

"I was the proudest boy in the whole world."

That was the start of the Mack business for the Caines. Better than seventy-five years later, it’s still running.

Seventeen and Hauling

The company his grandchildren run today began with that seventeen-year-old and a farm truck. “Grandpa started the company — Grandpa and Grandma, back in 1947,” one of them says. “Then my uncles and my dad all worked through the business.”

Before the first Mack, there was a 1939 Chevrolet — a one-and-a-half-ton farm truck. He took it, started hauling product, and called it Caine Transfer. No terminal, no fleet, no plan on paper. Just a truck and a teenager who had decided he was going to run a trucking company.

The uncles came in. The dad came in. The business grew around the door yard where it started.

The Company That Grew Around It

Caine Transfer is a regional carrier, upper Midwest only. It runs a roughly 550-mile radius out of its terminal in Lowell, Wisconsin — close enough to know every customer, far enough to matter to a lot of them.

Forty to fifty trucks move through that territory every day. The customer list is diverse, and much of it is old: many of the accounts have been with Caine Transfer for more than thirty years. In a business where carriers get swapped over a single bad week, thirty-year customers are not an accident. They are the whole point.

Family owned. Family operated. Better than seventy-five years in.

Family First

Ask anyone at Caine Transfer what the company is built on and the answer is one word.

"Family means everything. Family comes first."

It isn’t a slogan on the wall. It’s how the place runs. They work together as a family. They trust each other as a family. The loyal, long-tenured employees aren’t staff — in the way the company talks about itself, they are Caine Transfer.

Why Kriete

When a company defines itself that plainly, its vendors don’t get graded on price sheets. They get measured against the family standard. Either you’re trusted like family or you’re not.

"I can trust the guys at Kriete just like family."

The company’s history is closely tied to Mack, but its relationship with Kriete has continued to grow. Today, Caine Transfer also purchases Volvo trucks from Kriete, relying on the same team for the equipment, service, parts, and support needed to keep its operation moving.

The trucks are chosen for the old reasons — reliability, durability, and the ability to get done what needs doing. But the reason Caine Transfer keeps coming back to Kriete isn’t only the badge on the hood. It’s the phone.

“If I need something, I know they’ll get it to me,” he says — on time, when it’s needed, so the fleet keeps rolling. Forty to fifty trucks a day only stay moving if the parts and the service show up when they’re supposed to. Kriete shows up. That’s the entire ask, and most vendors can’t keep it. Kriete does.

The Bulldog that Chester Sr. recognized in the door yard is still part of the Caine family story. Today, that story continues with both Mack and Volvo trucks — and with Kriete helping keep them on the road.

The Blanket

There’s a thing that happens when the founder of a family business gets old and looks around at what he built.

“When you get old, your family around you is just like a blanket,” he says. “It makes you feel warm.”

We did it, he says. The family did it. And the loyal, loyal employees did it — they’re Caine Transfer, every one of them.

It started with a seventeen-year-old, a farm truck, and a father who never thought he’d see another Mack Bulldog. It runs now on forty to fifty of them a day, a terminal in Lowell, three generations, thirty-year customers — and a dealer the family trusts the way it trusts its own.

That’s what family looks like when it’s built to last.