Valley Wide Energy Cylinder Exchange
A few years ago, the Valley Wide Cooperative energy team noticed a gap in the marketplace for a regional, customer-focused company in the propane cylinder exchange business. At that time, only the national propane retailers were servicing that business, and often they weren’t doing it well, leaving customers waiting days for trucks to fill their propane cages.
Customer-focused model
Positioned to solve this issue, the Valley Wide team began a propane cylinder exchange enterprise, first in our retail locations, Valley Wide Country Stores. Our customer-first model quickly caught on, and interest from gas stations, convenience stores, and grocery stores flooded in.
You can find the Valley Wide stainless-steel cylinder cages in front of stores all over the northwest. These cages have electric monitors that notify the team when inventory is low. This, unique to the industry monitoring, ensures there is essentially no wait time for customers.
Region-wide, all over the Northwest
Today, Valley Wide Cooperative has over 500 cylinder-exchange locations in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado. The energy team recently finished its overhaul of the Stinker Store cylinder exchange, a large project that has brought the Valley Wide logo to new regions. To date, the Valley Wide team has exchanged over 55,000 tanks. That’s a lot of clean-burning fuel.
Don’t forget the forklift exchange
The propane exchanges we’ve been talking about are the tanks commonly used in grills and RVs. However, our cylinder exchange program also services businesses that use propane to fuel their forklifts. Rather than forklift operators getting off their equipment and filling up their tank they simply exchange their tank for a Valley Wide-filled tank. Our team will pick up the empties and return them with filled tanks. Easy-peasy.
