Bidfood will open two brand new depots in 2023 as part of a wider plan to strengthen its current 24-strong depot network, offering customers a truly local service. The first of the new sites will be based in Glasgow, covering the West of Scotland, and is set to open in early spring of 2023.
The second, in Bedford, is the group’s second largest depot to date at 160,000 sq feet and will support the central England area.
Mark Wood, Chief Operating Officer of Bidfood, tells Wholesale Manager more about the depot openings and the group’s other plans.
What does your job as Chief Operating Officer involve?
I oversee the day-to-day administrative and operational functions of the business at Bidfood. As the COO, I am responsible for all of our wholesale Bidfood depots and teams, 26 sites (47 BFS Group) and more than 4,500 employees across the UK.
Do you personally get involved with looking after customers and developing new foodservice products?
Yes in the general running of our operations, I am responsible for both our sales teams and operations teams, and therefore I do get to meet customers from time to time. It’s important to me to stay in tune with how we support them and how they experience Bidfood and the service we provide. Most of the time, however, I’ve been working behind the scenes on the innovation we’ve put in place to take our service to customers to the next level, leading the transformation of our technology, processes, systems and teams to take this to the next level.
Bidfood is opening two new depots in 2023.
Where will the depots be located, how big will they be, how many customers will they serve and what will their catchment areas be?
The openings represent considerable investment in our infrastructure, creating more capacity to meet growing demand from our customers and enabling us to be closer to them. Our Glasgow depot is 90,000 sq feet and will cover the west of Scotland. Our Bedford depot is our largest depot to date at 160,000 sq feet and will support our central England area. Our teams are continuing to refine our customer profiles for both depots but we estimate that they will supply between 2,000 to 2,500 customers. We are also investing in new technology to support our drivers and warehouse teams, and to continue driving improvements in our service to customers.
Are there plans to launch further depots after Glasgow and Bedfordshire?
It’s a really exciting time for the business and as well as the two depots opening this year, a third additional depot in the Midlands area has also been commissioned. However, this will not be active until 2024.
How big a priority is using UK-grown ingredients?
Using UK-grown ingredients not only makes sense from a customer and commercial point of view, it’s also largely better for the planet. Our research tells us that British is the most popular menu descriptor, overtaking ‘sustainable, ‘healthy’, ‘local’ and ‘seasonal’. The top three menu descriptors that adults find most appealing, in fact, are British, local and healthy. It’s therefore crucial for some of our customers, and we have nearly 3,000 products that are UK or British in origin i.e. they are primarily (i.e. 65% born, reared, slaughtered or grown in the UK.)
What has the last year’s trading been like?
Considering the challenging few years we’ve had as a business and an industry, I’m pleased to report that we’ve had a strong year of trading in 2022.
Last financial year saw a strong and successful recovery in our sales and profit levels. This demonstrates that our customers continue to value our service, and the key ingredients that support it: great food, real value, forward thinking and best team. We have continued to win new business, acquire some fantastic new businesses into our Caterfood Buying Group and win a number of notable awards, including Wholesaler of the Year at the FWD (Federation of Wholesale Distributors) awards in November 2022.
What kinds of foodservice and catering operations does Bidfood supply?
We supply across all sectors both public and private including: business and industry, care homes, coffee shops, dark kitchens, hospitals, leisure, pubs, restaurants, schools, travel and universities.
What different kinds of food products do you offer – how many food product lines do you offer, across how many categories?
In our range of over 10,000 products, we offer 12 different categories which consist of: drinks, snacks and confectionery, meat and poultry, fish and seafood bakery, desserts, everyday essentials, meal solutions, dairy, delicatessen, produce and accompanies, alcohol and catering supplies. These categories cover dry, fresh, frozen, and chilled lines.
What’s your lead time for orders?
It varies by customer but the majority is with either day 1 order for day 2 or 3 delivery.
What is Bidfood doing to reduce your environmental impact? Do you have any electric vehicles in your fleet? How many refrigerated vans and lorries do you have?
Our vision at Bidfood is to be a positive force for change and take our climate responsibilities seriously. We have set an overall aspiration to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2045.
In 2020 we set objectives to reduce our food waste by 63% between 2020 and 2030. So far, we have achieved 21% reduction in food waste (as % of total food handled) since 2020, we have also set the target to achieve recycling rates of 85%.
We are aligned to the objectives of the UK Plastics Pact and as part of this we have multiple commitments and targets in place to reduce the amount of plastic we use in our packaging, as well as improve its recyclability. For example, we have removed PVC and polystyrene from our range of packaging products and are making all own brand ready meal tray packaging widely recyclable by 2024.
We completed an HVO trial at Edinburgh and are currently reviewing the results of that trial, to guide our decisions on next steps regarding wider rollout. We’re also running an electric vehicle from our depot in Battersea. We have started a programme of solar panel installation to reduce our reliance on grid electricity and use more renewable energy; installation has commenced at 3 depots and will progress further across our UK estate throughout 2023.
Where do you see Bidfood going?
From strength to strength. So far, 2023 has shown that it’s going to be an incredibly exciting year for us as a business. We have some exciting plans for our infrastructure which we’ve recently unveiled, as we extend our network of depots. These plans demonstrate our key principle of remaining closer to customers which we see as even more important in today’s market when agility is so incredibly important to our customers and our ability to support them.
We’ve also recently expanded our Caterfood Buying Group family with the addition of Nichol Hughes, Harvest Fine Foods and Thomas Ridley, making it one of the leading buying groups in the UK.
We’re investing heavily in technology. In fact, last year we rolled out order delivery tracking and menu planning for our online trading platform, Bidfood Direct, which is an invaluable tool in today’s inflationary climate when many businesses are having to look at engineering their menus to maintain margin.
We’re also actively driving our innovation programme, and have launched a great many tools helping customers with advice and inspiration- for example Unlock Your Menu which is our online hub, packed full of guidance on minimising costs and maximising the resources in your kitchen.
At the end of the day it’s all about delivering service excellence for our customers, which is not just about providing great food, drink and catering supplies. Right now it’s also about providing them with real value in the form of the right advice, support, insight and inspiration, as well as plenty of great offers that really work for their business.
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