Frozen Assets

Christian Salvesen is a major European logistics business employing some 13,000 staff and operating in seven countries. The company specialises in managing outsourced supply chain operations for manufacturing and retail customers in the industrial, consumer and food sectors. Working in partnership with their customers Christian Salvesen optimises inventories and ensures that goods are available precisely where and when required.

In the United Kingdom, the company's temperature controlled business unit is a leader in frozen food logistics. Operating from twelve sites, the business supplies frozen food products to retail giants such as Tesco, Asda and Marks & Spencer.

One of the company's sites, in Lowestoft, is in a state of continual expansion. Over the last five years it has seen over £2 million worth of investment to keep pace with demand for the services it provides.

Recently the racking system was extended to provide more storage capacity. Redirack was chosen to supply and install drive-in, drive-through and push back racking that would add over five thousand pallet positions to the store. Being a cold store, space utilisation is extremely important.

The blend of racking types made the most economical use of the available space.

Seven new blocks of racking were added to two cold store chambers. Three are drive-in, two drive through one push back and one standard pallet racking.

The racking blocks run for nearly seventy metres and rise to just under nine. The drive-in and drive-through racking has either four or five levels, the push back four. The push back is arranged as two blocks of three deep, built back to back. This means excellent storage density and improved selectivity over six deep drive-in.

Push Back pallet racking is a product that combines the benefits of drive-in racking with dynamic storage. Ideally suited to order picking operations it enables rack that is accessible from only one face to be fully utilised, in this case to store three pallets at each level in each bay.

Sacrificial legs are installed on all the frames front legs, enabling the racking to be repaired quickly and efficiently in the inevitable event of the racking being hit by a forklift truck.

The delivery and installation time frame was tight and made complicated by the numerous other contractors that were working on the project. This meant the installation had to be completed in phases. However, it all went well as Mark Pawlett, Manufacturing and Engineering Manager at Christian Salvesen said “Redirack provided a cost effective answer to our racking needs. The installation was swift and seamless, and the product is of outstanding quality.”