Guide · June 22, 2026
A forklift that grips instead of lifts from underneath. It's how a warehouse moves appliances, paper rolls and boxed goods that never touch a pallet — and how a floor-loaded container gets unloaded fast.
A clamp truck — also called a clamp forklift — is a forklift fitted with a hydraulic clamp attachment instead of (or in addition to) standard forks. Rather than sliding forks under a pallet, the operator closes two padded arms around the load and grips it to lift and move it. That lets a warehouse handle product that isn't palletized at all — which is exactly what you find inside a floor-loaded ocean container.
Pallets cost money, take up space and add weight. A lot of freight ships floor-loaded — stacked directly on the container floor with no pallet — to fit more in the box. To unload that quickly without hand-stacking every carton, you need a truck that can grip the load itself. A clamp truck does that: it squeezes a block of boxed goods, a stack, or a single large item and carries it in one motion. It's a core piece of equipment for transloading a floor-loaded container and for moving non-palletized inventory around a warehouse.
Appliances (refrigerators, washers), cased beverages and canned goods, electronics in cartons, paper and pulp rolls, baled materials, and a lot of the floor-loaded import freight that comes through the ports. If your container arrives without pallets, a clamp truck is usually what gets it out of the box and onto the dock quickly — without the labor of hand-unloading and re-palletizing every piece.
For an importer, the clamp truck shows up at the moment a container is stripped: the box comes off the terminal on a chassis (drayage), and at the dock it's either unloaded into storage or transloaded straight onto domestic trucks. Floor-loaded freight makes that step slower and more labor-heavy unless the operation has the right material-handling equipment on hand. Running our own warehouse in Kent — with overflow capacity through partners like Long Road Warehouse — means the equipment and the dock are ready when the container arrives, instead of the freight waiting on a vendor.
A forklift fitted with a hydraulic clamp attachment that grips a load between padded arms instead of lifting it on forks — used to move product that isn't on a pallet.
A standard forklift lifts palletized loads from underneath with forks; a clamp truck (a forklift with a clamp attachment) grips the load itself, letting it handle non-palletized or floor-loaded freight.
Appliances, cased and canned goods, cartoned electronics, paper rolls, baled materials and drums — and much of the floor-loaded freight that arrives in ocean containers without pallets.
Many containers are floor-loaded (no pallets) to maximize space. A clamp truck grips stacks of boxed goods directly, so the container can be stripped quickly without hand-stacking and re-palletizing every carton.