Premier Foods, whose brands include Batchelor’s and Bisto, has awarded a five year contract to Wincanton to operate an ambient warehouse in Corby processing 80 million cases a year.
In August, Premier announced that it was restructuring its logistics and head office operations and expected to make £20m savings as a result. It now expects to double this to over £40 million by 2013.
Under the new contract, Wincanton will store an average of 35,000 pallets at its 280,000 sq ft warehouse in Corby. When volumes increase during peak periods, additional space will be available at one of several Wincanton sites in the area.
Chris Chaplin, Premier’s customer services & logistics director, said: “Outsourcing our southern based ambient warehousing to Wincanton will enable us to be closer to our customer base and help us to minimise the impact of our operations on the environment.”
“We are looking forward to working in partnership with Wincanton, who we see as being able to offer a flexible and agile approach in conjunction with operational efficiencies. We can ‘top up’ any storage we may need at any time, without having to go to another third party, and the fact that Wincanton has other warehouse operations in the area means we have a first class solution to meet our needs.”
Premier Foods is restructuring its business to focus on eight “power brands” – Hovis, Ambrosia, Mr Kipling, Sharwood’s, Loyd Grossman, Bisto, Oxo and Batchelors.
At the same time it has accelerated the divestiture of non-core businesses, completing the sale of its Brookes Avana chilled food business and announcing the agreement to sell its four Irish grocery brands in recent weeks. Further selected businesses are expected to be divested in 2012. It has also announced 600 redundancies among its workforce of 12,000.