country. ‘A customer can order a hundred or a thousand cases of fresh meat,’ he says, ‘and then they can phone up on Monday morning and say they want the order doubled that afternoon. We’re frantically trying to meet that, and they penalise us like hell if we don’t.’ 9 The entire operation is run on a knife-edge, so any disruption to it, such as the Hemel Hempstead fuel depot fire in 2005, causes instant chaos. That fire affected only one M&S dry goods depot, but, according to Duncan, it could have been a lot worse: ‘If one depot goes down you have a complete logistical nightmare. If a Tesco’s depot went down, they’re so huge, I can’t imagine the consequences.’ Moving food around Britain is hard enough, but when you factor inthe food we import from abroad every year, you have a very complex operation indeed. ‘Global trading is the future,’ says Duncan, ‘and understanding logistics is it. The timing and processing of the order – you can’t get it wrong. It’s in different languages too: you’re working in Thailand; it’s a Chinese boat; you’ve got Dutch legislation; I don’t know how it works! You wouldn’t want to think about it for too long – you’d go crazy.’
As the name of its own research body, the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD), indicates, the British food retail industry is obsessed with logistics. To read the IGD’s annual report,
Retail Logistics
, is to wallow in the code language of a rapidly evolving industry. According to the report, 94.7 per cent of British supermarket groceries are now handled by depots like the one at Crick, an increasing number run by specialist ‘third-party logistics’ (3PL) companies, set up to cope with the complexities of international haulage. Third-party logistics is a fast-growing business: a 2005 merger between two of its major players, Exel and Deutsche Post, created a company with half a million employees and an annual turnover of £38 billion. Other hot distribution trends for 2007 included RRP (retail-ready packaging), packaging that can protect food in transit yet be displayed directly on supermarket shelves; CPFR (collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment), an industry resolution to talk to itself more; and RFID (radio-frequency identification), computer chips embedded in packaging that will eventually allow supermarkets to trace food all the way from its source and into our homes. But for now, the supermarkets’ chief goal remains on-shelf availability (OSA). Apparently the one thing that can actually lose them customers is a failure to supply us with our favourite brand of cupcake or tea bag.
However many gizmos they employ, there is no doubt that supermarkets have got the business of food supply down to a fine art. Advanced preservation techniques and transport technology have combined to create the illusion that feeding cities is easy. It isn’t. Yet the better the food industry gets at what it does, the more we forget how much we depend on it. The reality is that supermarkets have a stranglehold over not just the grocery sector, but the entire infrastructure that supplies our food. Without them, we wouldstruggle to feed ourselves; and that makes their position close to unassailable.
This Little Piggy …
One of the reasons it can be hard to appreciate the effort it takes to feed a modern city is the sheer invisibility of the process. Not many of us make casual trips to food hubs like Crick. Even if we wanted to, visitors are about as welcome there as they would be at a top-secret military installation. The food industry is a highly secretive operation. We live in ignorance of the 24-hour effort that keeps our lasagnes coming, and that suits the industry just fine.
Before the railways, it was a very different story. Transporting food was often harder than growing it in the first place – no more so than for grain, every city’s staple food. Grain was too heavy and bulky to carry more than a few
As the name of its own research body, the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD), indicates, the British food retail industry is obsessed with logistics. To read the IGD’s annual report,
Retail Logistics
, is to wallow in the code language of a rapidly evolving industry. According to the report, 94.7 per cent of British supermarket groceries are now handled by depots like the one at Crick, an increasing number run by specialist ‘third-party logistics’ (3PL) companies, set up to cope with the complexities of international haulage. Third-party logistics is a fast-growing business: a 2005 merger between two of its major players, Exel and Deutsche Post, created a company with half a million employees and an annual turnover of £38 billion. Other hot distribution trends for 2007 included RRP (retail-ready packaging), packaging that can protect food in transit yet be displayed directly on supermarket shelves; CPFR (collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment), an industry resolution to talk to itself more; and RFID (radio-frequency identification), computer chips embedded in packaging that will eventually allow supermarkets to trace food all the way from its source and into our homes. But for now, the supermarkets’ chief goal remains on-shelf availability (OSA). Apparently the one thing that can actually lose them customers is a failure to supply us with our favourite brand of cupcake or tea bag.
However many gizmos they employ, there is no doubt that supermarkets have got the business of food supply down to a fine art. Advanced preservation techniques and transport technology have combined to create the illusion that feeding cities is easy. It isn’t. Yet the better the food industry gets at what it does, the more we forget how much we depend on it. The reality is that supermarkets have a stranglehold over not just the grocery sector, but the entire infrastructure that supplies our food. Without them, we wouldstruggle to feed ourselves; and that makes their position close to unassailable.
This Little Piggy …
One of the reasons it can be hard to appreciate the effort it takes to feed a modern city is the sheer invisibility of the process. Not many of us make casual trips to food hubs like Crick. Even if we wanted to, visitors are about as welcome there as they would be at a top-secret military installation. The food industry is a highly secretive operation. We live in ignorance of the 24-hour effort that keeps our lasagnes coming, and that suits the industry just fine.
Before the railways, it was a very different story. Transporting food was often harder than growing it in the first place – no more so than for grain, every city’s staple food. Grain was too heavy and bulky to carry more than a few
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