Heywood, UK: Frozen food specialist, Yearsley Group is expanding its ambient storage warehousing by 6,000sq metres to provide 7,500 additional pallet spaces.
The £500,000 refurbishment within Yearsley Group’s existing facilities is in response to demand from local manufacturers and importers to use a single supplier for their frozen and dry goods.
The newly refurbished dry goods store complements the group’s 40,000-pallet frozen store at Grimsby. Yearsley expects existing customers will want to take space in both sections for raw materials and packaging as well as finished products.
The new store is also aimed at new customers that do not require frozen storage and could even be used to store non-food items such as homewares and electricals.
An Aisle-Master articulated truck working the new ambient store at the Yearsley's Grimsby depot
Harry Yearsley, managing director of Yearsley Group, said: “We store and distribute a lot of frozen stock on behalf of local manufacturers and importers using the Humber ports, and we realised many of them also have a requirement for dry goods storage. Rather than split their deliveries – taking on additional contracts, management time and road miles – we took a decision to invest in our facility in order to offer that additional service to our customers.
“Bringing the same level of service, quality of customer relations and best-in-class warehouse management system that we offer for cold storage to the ambient market, will also open up new opportunities for us in the area, enabling us to extend our service provision to a whole new range of customers.”
The ambient store has narrow aisles, accessed by articulated forklift trucks supplied by Aisle-Master that can retrieve pallets as well as individual cases.
Ancillary services are also available, including individual order picking, shrink-wrapping and onward dispatch.
The new storage space provides additional support for the Yearsley Group Vendor Management service where suppliers to local manufacturers store all their raw materials in one place, reducing the amount of storage required by each individual manufacturer and enabling them to place specific orders as required. Storage of the frozen and non-frozen raw materials in the same place reduces management time for manufacturers and enables better consolidation of loads, Yearsley says.
Customers will also have access to Yearsley bespoke warehouse management system Net Stock. Yearsley Group consolidates stock from manufacturers in its national network of 12 cold stores enabling customers to reduce their own storage requirements. Delivery is with 300 temperature controlled vehicle fleet.
