Birchall Foodservice is a wholesale food supplier built on strong family values for over 80 years.
The fifth generation family business has quality products and supreme customer service at the forefront of its offering.
Birchall prides itself on going the extra mile and has the flexibility and local knowledge to achieve this with a strategic vision of supply to independent caterers.
Louise Birchall, Director, Birchall Foodservice, tells Wholesale Manager what the last year’s trading has been like and what the company is doing to reduce its environmental impact.
How many products are in Birchall Foodservice’s range?
Over 6,500, including over 600 from our own brand, Country Range.
How big a priority is using UK-grown ingredients?
It’s becoming more and more important. We want to reduce our carbon emissions every year, and buying local, UK produce will help us achieve this.
Do you run promotional programmes? How often do they run? How many products are included in the promotional programmes?
As we are part of the Country Range group, we offer monthly promotions via the Stir it up magazine.
What geographical areas do you deliver to?
We deliver from the borders down to Birmingham. Our main depot is in Burnley, and we have satellite depots in Durham and Sheffield.
What different kinds of food products do you offer – how many food product lines do you offer, across how many categories?
We offer a one stop shop for our customers, and our range includes fresh fruit & veg, fresh butchery, ambient products, chilled goods, frozen goods, cleaning supplies, disposables, alcohol, catering equipment and more. We are always adding exciting, new products to our range.
How many vehicles do you have in your fleet and are they multi-temperature vehicles?
40 vehicles in our fleet. Our multi-temperature vehicles allow us to deliver an entire order on one vehicle. One invoice, one delivery.
How many staff do you employ?
145.
What has the last year’s trading been like?
Positive. We’ve seen growth in online sales via our e-commerce site, OrderMate, and we’ve seen growth across all 3 of our customer sectors; care, education and hospitality.
What’s your lead time for orders?
We offer next-day delivery for the vast majority of our products. For more bespoke items, we can usually provide a turnaround time of 2-3 days.
We’re all under pressure to be green. What are you 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 sustainability group is made up of 4 people from 4 different departments in the business; operations, buying, business support and marketing. For over 2 years, we have been working with Climate Partner to calculate our carbon emissions. We measured our emissions for 2019 and for 2022 to identify how much our emissions dropped in that 3 year period. Our carbon emissions dropped by a massive 46%. Two big changes we made in the business led to this huge drop. We installed solar panels, which helped reduce our electricity emissions by 49%. And we introduced a fleet of greener vehicles. These vehicles helped reduce our transport emissions by 38%. We have set ourselves the challenge to keep reducing our emissions every year.
Our main fleet has grown steadily over the past 12 months with the introduction of new, ‘greener’ delivery vehicles. The new vehicles come equipped with 3 separate compartments; one for chilled, one for frozen and one for ambient. This improves efficiency as we no longer have to chill the entire back of the vehicle. All our new vehicles also have air curtains, which help maintain temperature.
We have explored alternative fuels and to date, they are not economically viable. However, this remains high on our priorities and we are always looking at what is happening in the market and keeping abreast of the latest developments.
In terms of our grey fleet, all sales reps and directors now have electric cars, and we have installed electric charging points in our car park. These can be used by employees and visitors.
Comments are closed.