by DONNA CURRIE
Hippo Hopper got its start when the company FabCorp began building self-dumping hoppers to supply the local scrap dealers in Texas about 25 years ago. John Minacapelli, the company’s sales manager, explained that at that time most of the hoppers were being built in the Midwest, and shipping costs for those hoppers going to Texas were expensive.
FabCorp designed and built a line of self-dumping hoppers in just a few sizes, based on what the locals were looking for. For the first few years, all the hoppers were built to order, with nothing made for stock.
It wasn’t long before Hippo Hopper grew and became its own company, still owned by FabCorp. And it wasn’t much longer before Minacapelli joined the company. He met FabCorp’s owner, Allan Hohman, who told Minacapelli about the hoppers that he wanted to promote. Minacapelli decided to come onboard to develop a marketing strategy and a true brand.
As the years went by, the company increased its production and began building hoppers for inventory, so customers could get their products faster. “We slowly developed a product,” Minacapelli said, “now, we have as many or more than other manufacturers.”
The product line includes 11 standard sizes of self-dumping Hippo Hoppers, from 1/4 yard to 5 yards, and they make those sizes in 3 different versions. The light duty boxes can handle up to 2,000 pounds, the medium duty can handle up to 4,000 pounds and the heavy duty handles up to 6,500 pounds, so there’s something for every material and every customer.
The company also makes specialty boxes for customers. Some of those are then added to the product line, like hoppers built to handle liquid waste or those that can be handled with a crane rather than a fork lift.
“We still do a lot of custom stuff,” Minacapelli said. “We have a whole fabrication facility.” He noted that while other companies only do hoppers, they can make everything “from a little square box to a dump truck. And we have.”
The name Hippo Hopper was chosen not just because it was catchy, but also because of the image. “We picked the biggest thing that was rough and tough,” Minacapelli said. “And it had a big mouth.” The company wants people to know and identify the name with the product, so the name is welded into the rockers of each self-dumping hopper that leaves the facility.
Hippos aren’t the only wild animals roaming the facility, though. Monkey boxes are square boxes that are meant to be rotated for dumping rather than flipping forward. They’re available in sizes from two to eight yards and are intended for use with fork lift trucks with rotating forks. These are usually used for more expensive metals that take longer to accumulate, like copper.
Frog Hoppers are “shorter, longer, and squattier to fit in small spaces” and they roll on bearings. They’re shorter in height, but longer from front to back and because of the design, “it leaps forward when it dumps,” Minacapelli said.
Grizzly Boxes are “a very big version of the Monkey Box with a door like a dump truck,” Minacapelli said. These can be dumped rather than rotated, and can be equipped with crane hooks.
All of the boxes come standard with a drain plug on the bottom, so liquids can be drained and saved, and so oil and other liquids aren’t being sent out with the scrap. On some hoppers, a screen is added to the bottom for even better drainage. Minacapelli said that all of their boxes are watertight and are fully tested before they’re painted, to make sure they won’t leak.
While scrap dealers are obvious customers for the hoppers, Hippo Hopper sells all over the world, and some of the boxes travel to very interesting places, like Antarctica. Everything that goes into Antarctica with people must come out again, so the boxes are used to bring supplies in and to remove any trash that has accumulated.
While the company now has a very large catalog of standard equipment, they’re often asked to design boxes for specific purposes, and the main issue is that “they have to dump.” The designs are restricted to specific sizes and ratios so they work.
That said, the company has designed some interesting boxes, like those that had to fit into pits between two machines that produced the scrap, or a job where the customer needed dust collection boxes, but each was a different size.
Trying to guess what customers will order is just about impossible, though, since an order can be for one single hopper or for hundreds of them. Up to about six months ago, the company was often scrambling to keep up with orders, but some equipment changes allowed them to “turn a corner” and catch up. Now, they’re more efficient, they’re building inventory, and they’ve cut back on waste.
While Minacapelli’s official title is sales, he said that since the company is small, everyone has to wear a lot of different hats. He might be working on sales one day, and then working on design or updating the website. But no matter what he’s working on, he said, “I’m the hippo guy.”
Published in the March 2019 Edition