The Industrial Heritage Group

Leader:  Mike Stow - indhist@ashbyu3a.co.uk - phone 01530 469152

The Industrial Heritage Group is for members who have an interest in our industrial heritage of trains, cars, planes, bikes, early manufacturing etc. to visit museums, railways, factories and other places related to our industrial past. We occasionally take a quite broad view of what constitutes "Industrial Heritage" if it is of interest to us!

Travel arrangements vary depending on how far we have to travel, but generally we meet in Ashby to car-share.

Our trips are normally on Wednesdays unless otherwise stated.

Wednesday 30th April. Britvic National Distribution Centre, Magna Park, Lutterworth

This month we visited somewhere different to our usual old factories or museums. This time we went to Britvic’s national distribution centre (NDC) on Magna Park outside Lutterworth.

Magna Park is worth a mention in it’s own right as it is home to warehouses of some of the UK and Europe’s most recognisable brands including Toyota, BT, Asda Walmart, Disney, DHL, Lidl, Primark and of course Britvic. The site covers 550 acres and is Europe’s largest distribution centre. Despite this most of the buildings are out of sight behind trees and bushes making it a very green area, but quite difficult to navigate around as everywhere looks the same! When the Park was founded they planted 1 million trees on site.

Arriving at Britvic we were given a warm welcome and shown upstairs in the huge building to a conference room where Ian and Paul, our guides for the morning explained how the site worked.

The first surprise was that Britvic do not own the site nor do they employ anyone on it. The site is owned and run by Wincanton Group, who started out as in the dairy business shipping milk. They grew out of Cow & Gate (now Unigate). They are now one of the biggest logistics companies in the UK. Despite this most of the lorries taking goods to and from the warehouse are run by Eddie Stobbart. Logistics seems to be a strange world of diversification.

Britvic is now part of the Carlsberg Marston’s group and have 39 brands of non-alcoholic beverages in their portfolio including those made under license from Pepsi, plus the all the beers in the Carlsberg group.

So what happens at the NDC?

Britvic makes many of its drinks at Rugby where they are canned or bottled and then delivered by truck to NDC. There a robotic train of wagons takes them to the absolutely huge automated high-bay warehouse where they are stacked waiting to be sent out to retailers. This part of the building is 22m (70ft) high. It holds almost 50,000 pallets of drinks from all the brands. If it was full of standard cans of Pepsi there would be 155,400,960 cans = 51,000,000 litres of drink weighing 51,000 tonnes.

When a retailer, be it a supermarket chain or a smaller pub or shop places an order different products, they are taken out of storage by the same robots, and sent to the packing bay. There a surprisingly small number men with fork lift trucks split up the large pallets of single drinks and assemble new pallets with the mixed order. These are then wrapped and sent to the loading bay. Large orders for whole pallets go straight to the loading bay. There another fleet of forklifts whizz back and forth picking up pallets and loading them on to waiting trucks. A truck should only be in a loading bay for 30 mins before it is loaded and sent out.

All this movement of palletised goods is controlled by bar-codes on the pallets. The robots and the forklift drivers are told what to pick up and where to take it. The barcodes are checked for each movement.

But this is not the end for our drinks. The trucks will take them to a retailers warehouse or regional distribution centre before they move again to a supermarket’s own warehouse and finally out on to the shop floor.

This goes on 24/7, only stopping on Christmas Day and New Years Day. Amazingly there are only 65 people on the warehouse floor spread across 3 shifts, so about 20 people at any one time. However there is a much larger workforce looking after ordering, contracts, software and physical maintenance. Logistics is very hi-tech these days.

A fascinating and complex story. And to think this is happening in warehouses all over the country to all the other products and food that we consume every day.

Previous trips