Ice cream maker Fredericks Dairies makes products under licence for some of the largest brands in the food sector such as Cadbury’s, Del Monte, Vimto, Tate & Lyle, Britvic and Kraft.
Huge seasonal peaks for such a temperature sensitive product require large scale cold storage, and so cost and utilisation of the cube are a principal consideration.
The firm built a new 47,500 sq ft cold store extension at Simonswood and chose a new offering from RediRack’s automation division – RediTechniX – that promised 95 per cent cube utilisation.
An automated pallet storage, retrieval and sequencing system runs with a patented RediLogX pallet buffer and sequencer.
The system has five shuttles and five satellites serving five levels of storage, and can process some 600 pallets during an eight hour shift.
By leveraging the high storage density offered by automated shuttle technology, the RediShuttle system combines with the RediLogX pallet buffer and sequencing device to provide 80 per cent more storage space over a VNA system while reducing annual running costs by a similar amount.
“The RediRack system could give us 13,000 pallets in the same cube and payback would be much faster. The benefits clearly stacked up.
“We could see the high storage density would give us the lowest cost per pallet in terms of energy usage in chilling the cube and being a ‘black box’, with no lighting required, we could see further energy savings. Then, as the system is fully automated, we knew we could run the site on the same staffing levels,” said operations director Terry Haigh.
