Unfreeze your assets
April 1st 2009 A need to deliver greater pallet selectivity and order assembly is changing the way many
cold stores operate, says John Maguire, sales and marketing director of Narrow Aisle Flexi
In the UK, sales of chilled foods outstrip
those of frozen produce by a significant
margin. This is due, in no small part, to
years of clever marketing that has convinced
the British public that chilled meals are
fresher and more healthy than the frozen
alternative.
There are however, indications that
consumer opinion might be shifting. The
frozen ready meals market is growing as
more people begin to understand that
freezing is in itself a preservative and
(compared to chilled food) fewer chemicals
and other preservatives are required to
move frozen ready meals through the
supply chain.
The bigger retailers are understood to be
keenly watching the apparent rekindling of
the public's interest in frozen products. They
would appear to have much to gain by
nurturing the upturn in demand.
At present a high proportion of all chilled
ready meals fail to sell by their 'best before'
or 'sell by' date. Unsold produce goes to
landfill and its disposal is costing the food
industry and the supermarkets millions of
pounds every year. By contrast, frozen ready
meals have a much longer 'shelf life' and
retailers and their suppliers would expect to
significantly reduce this high level of
wastage if a genuine swing away from
chilled towards frozen products could be
engineered and encouraged to take hold.
Any significant growth in sales of frozen
ready meals is likely to have repercussions
for the cold chain the logistics sector.
Historically, the frozen ready meal's lack
of customer appeal, has meant that the
majority of frozen produce stored within
cold storage facilities has been primary
foodstuffs such as meat, fish, vegetables,
bread, dessert etc. A high percentage of
these products have usually been stored
and distributed as full pallet loads and
there has been little demand for complex
order picking and order assembly
processes within Britain's cold stores.
Now, however, as more frozen ready
meals enter the market, cold stores are
facing growing demand for greater pallet
selectivity and replenishment and customer
order assembly and, as a result, need to be
able to adopt the storage and picking
methods of the chilled and dry grocery
products sector.
Narrow Aisle has a number of cold
storage customers and this need to deliver
greater pallet selectivity and order assembly
is changing the way many of them run their
operations.
One – a third party warehousing
company – stores frozen ready meals on
behalf of one of the growing band of small
businesses to have entered the sector. The
firm is enjoying considerable success
producing premium quality 'home-made'
food in small batches, blast freezing it and
selling it through delicatessens, farm shops
and on-line outlets.
Traditionally the majority of movements
in and out of the store had been full pallet
loads. However, the success of its frozen
ready meal-producing client forced the
storage company to reconfigure its cold
store to allow individual customer orders to
be assembled.
At first the company considered installing
very narrow aisle trucks guided by either
steel rails or inductive wires cut into the
floor. However, the client decided against
going down this route because, it was felt,
that steel guide rails would limit access to
key ground level picking locations.
Furthermore, the proposed aisle dimensions
were too narrow for low level order picking.
Eventually the company settled upon a
combination of Flexi articulated trucks and
low level order pickers. The Flexi does not
require wire guidance or steel rails and
therefore the aisle width could be set to suit
the customer's order assembly profile. The
lack of steel guide rails meant that the first
rack beam could be set at two metres to
allow fast case picking.
Within any cold storage facility it is
essential to get maximum product density.
The previous occupiers of cold store 3PL
Norish's cold store site at Gillimgham had
operated a storage system based around
very narrow aisle racking and turret trucks.
Norish considered this arrangement
inefficient: the turret trucks, for example,
required a five metre wide transfer aisle –
something that its management team
quickly identified as a waste of valuable
storage space.
Having considered several alternatives,
Norish opted for a system with powered
mobile very narrow aisle racking supplied
and installed by Index Procon and served by
Flexi articulated forklift trucks from Narrow
Aisle at its heart.
The site's original configuration had
provided 4,000 pallet positions in two frozen
chambers operating at - 25°C . Norish took
the decision to sub-divide one of the
chambers – giving three separate and self
contained units in total; one of which would
be operated at chill while the other two
would operated as frozen storage chambers.
With each of the chambers fitted with
powered mobile racking with very narrow
aisles and fed by Flexi trucks, the Gillingham
facility now houses 6,200 pallet locations –
a 50 per cent increase in pallet capacity.
This has been achieved without extending
the physical dimensions of the building.
Forklifts operating in a cold store must be
properly adapted to the environment. For
example, at Norish's Gillingham site,
because they are spending a significant
proportion of their working day in
temperatures of -25°C or less and then
transferring to ambient/chill zones, all the
main components of the trucks are zinc
coated and all other parts cold store
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