About CarCaddy and DJ Products
CarCaddy is a battery-powered vehicle puller from DJ Products, Inc., based in Little Falls, Minnesota. DJ Products develops powered tug solutions for carts, trailers and other wheeled loads.
The CarCaddy Collector’s Edition is designed for museums, classic vehicle collections and consignment shops. Its low-profile design, adjustable roller arms and flip-up platform support the vehicle-moving applications described on our Purpose Built page.
Review the CarCaddy specifications for vehicle and front-axle weight limits, drive power and standard features. See customer testimonials, or contact our team at 800-686-2651 to discuss your vehicle and operating environment.
Electric-powered and motorized tug solutions.
DJ Products’ cart and trailer tug solutions use battery power to assist with moving wheeled loads. The company’s product range has expanded from shopping cart handling to applications involving trailers, vehicles and aircraft.
CarCaddy brings that powered-tug approach to vehicle collections. The Collector’s Edition includes a platform that flips up and down for rider or walk-behind operation; review the model’s specifications before selecting it for your application.
From Shopping Carts to Powered Tugs
The company story begins with Minnesota’s warehouse-style grocery stores. Wide aisles and bulk purchases called for larger shopping carts, while winter weather made collecting carts from parking lots difficult.
Employees had to gather long lines of carts and push them back to the store through slush, ice and snow. That everyday challenge inspired a powered shopping cart pusher and the product development described below.
An AHA Moment!
As this new brand of consumerism began taking the U.S. by storm, a senior engineer at a local manufacturing company, who had just spent 25 years perfecting the walk-behind floor scrubber for the construction industry, had an aha moment.
“What if I built a walk-behind floor scrubber, but without the scrubber, to collect shopping carts in the parking lot and push them back to the store. It would revolutionize shopping cart retrieval!”
And just like very other inventor with a bold new idea, our engineer, started eating, sleeping, and engineering the Shopping Cart Pusher, the ultimate solution for collecting and transporting shopping carts. He recruited his two sons to help him build a prototype to find out if grocery store executives would embrace his new idea.
The First Demonstration
The first son said, “I took the prototype out to all the local food chains that owned 12 to 15 stores. They loved the concept. I left my first demonstration with a purchase order for five units. I delivered the five, then visited another group of grocery stores, and gave the same demonstration. I got an order for ten more.”
The second son said, “After we got the first ten orders, I turned my eight-car heated garage into our production facility. The first year we sold one hundred units. The next year we tripled that.”
A Great Idea Becomes a Global Business
Within five years, this start-up attracted the interest of Costco, Walmart, Target, and the Food Marketing Institute. Our engineer went back to the drawing board and prototyped solutions for pushing everything else on wheels.