Additional depot at Evesham
At the beginning of last year we invested in a new depot on the Vale Park estate in Evesham. Due to increased business the site has been running at 100% capacity. We’re pleased to announce that we have bought an additional site – formerly a Kanes Foods depot – conveniently located just down the road.
Additional depot at Evesham
The satellite picture above shows the existing site in green and the new site in red. The new site is a fully refrigerated facility with 18 loading bays. Our plan is to double the size of the building with four triple-racked coldstore chambers, new offices and a chefs’ development kitchen – this should cope with future growth and provide a facility similar to our depot in Poeldijk, Holland. As you can see the new site has a roof full of solar panels which we will replicate on the extension therefore pulling a high proportion of our electricity from a renewable energy source. We also plan to keep the existing site and run the two in tandem.
As a group we have seen growth across all divisions in our financial year ending May 2019 which has resulted in a 24% increase in turnover from £116m to £144m. The largest growth rate was at our Evesham division. I’m often asked exactly what it is we do at Evesham. The answer is we specialise in supplying the non-retail sector with a huge range of produce procured directly by our network of offices/depots around Europe. It’s a complex operation.
Last financial year through the Evesham depot we handled just over 200 different types of produce from Tomatoes to Turmeric and Carrots to Carambola. For each type of produce there can be dozens if not hundreds of lines or SKUs. Last FY through Evesham we handled 8200 SKUs bought from 580 growers and sold to 740 customers.
The produce is bought into Evesham from around the world, usually by the full load/container and directly from the grower. Some pallets are despatched untouched/whole but most are broken down and picked to order – a single pallet can contain up to 60 SKUs. Our customers are mainly wholesalers, secondary wholesalers, caterers, food-service and processors. Our expert team of pickers break the whole pallets down and pick to order building up pallets to customer requirements.
Over 90% of customers for Evesham are based in the UK or Ireland – our aim is to deliver the goods to the customer within 12 to 24 hours of receipt of order. To cater for customers in the more remote areas of the UK, we offer a timed delivery service on our own fleet of 26t rigid refrigerated lorries. It’s a complex, high-turnaround operation and we certainly wouldn’t be able to achieve it without the support of our bespoke ERP system. We have a team of IT staff based at our head-office in Southport working full time on our ERP system which runs the whole business.
We will soon be launching an on-line ordering platform linked to the Nationwide App so customers can easily place orders on their mobile phones 24 hours a day. In summary, we aim to supply a full range of cheaper, fresher, directly-sourced, fully-traceable produce from around the world to our non-retail customers throughout Europe.
For further information on Evesham please contact Scott Hollins and the team on 01386 424800 or Vitaal-Evesham@vitaal.co.uk.
Regards
Tim O’Malley
