On the Double: Greggs Launches First Ever Double Deck Greggs is a strong and trusted brand that has become a customer favourite for food-on-the-go. The key to its large share of an extremely competitive market is twofold, keeping pace with changing customer buyer behaviours and successfully operating from over 2050 shops. An enabler of its agility and scale is having full ownership of its supply chain. Only by management of its own supply operations, has it been able to react and develop the custom-made, flexible products required to deliver exactly what its customers need, across a vast number of locations. Since 2007, Gray & Adams has been Greggs’ partner of choice for developing bespoke cold chain delivery solutions and helping to deliver high volumes of product mixes which meet the demands of its customers. To this end, across the last five years, Gray & Adams has designed a new generation of solutions, which ultimately increase the payload Greggs can deliver on a single run.
Customer Challenge Due to the demand for greater economies of scale and environmental efficiencies, Greggs wanted to deliver higher volumes of product in a single journey. Unfortunately, due to the mix of products delivered from its multiple manufacturing sites, the desired double deck solution would have reached maximum weight restrictions before it was at capacity. Therefore, Greggs needed Gray & Adams to develop an interim solution, which delivered higher volumes than its current rigids and 13.6 metre trailers. Greggs engaged with a re-development of its manufacturing process and altered the set up at their Newcastle facility, adding a fully automated freezer solution to existing frozen production and utilising the site as a consolidation centre. This move enabled the business to create a product mix for transport that could make use of the maximum capacity of a double deck solution. Following this, the project was for Gray & Adams to develop their first ever double deck trailer. The solution required to stick to tight height restrictions on both decks. This was due to the use of non-standard pallet sizes and the need to interact with existing moving and handling equipment. The solution also required dedicated temperature control for both decks and the ability to seal one deck once loaded, so the other deck could be loaded without impacting the temperature of the now-full deck. Environmental performance was also a necessity, as was durability, with the trailer’s lifespan specified as ten years minimum. Finally, with food safety paramount to operations, all finishes had to be capped to guard against food contamination.
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