WestCountry – Driving efficiencies

WestCountry is the oldest and largest specialist wholesaler of fresh produce in the southwest.

From humble beginnings provisioning ships in the port of Falmouth, the business has grown progressively over recent decades adding product ranges to complement its core fresh produce heritage and meet the ever-evolving needs of its customers.

WestCountry now distributes thousands of products every day through a stable of trusted brands, with a market leading seven day a week delivery service that makes it the one-stop shop for foodservice and high-quality independent retailers across the southwest.

James Russell, Managing Director at WestCountry, tells Wholesale Manager what will be the impact of WestCountry’s merger with MJ Baker and what benefits the business gets from being a member of Country Range.

Where have you worked before and in what roles?

I’ve been in the UK for 24 years now. I started working in tobacco for JTI across finance, supply chain and other functions. I first got exposed to the wholesale channel in 2006 through our biggest customer, Palmer & Harvey. We worked as a tobacco business with a lot of wholesale outlets. More than three quarters of our volume went through wholesalers and distributors. I moved across to Britvic in 2008 to work as trading director for the cash & carry and wholesale channel. I then moved into a smaller wholesale business called Rowan, which specialised in clearance and short shelf life, distressed inventory. We worked across Europe, which is fantastic, it got me out of FMCG and into some other categories. It broadened the network and broadened my experience. I eventually moved into the managing director role at AF Blakemore 10 years ago. I ran Blakemore’s wholesale business and had a vision to drive more volume through the group network. We developed a strategy and a plan to deliver on the motorway services first, I think almost all the MSAs in in the UK are serviced by them. Then we expanded into quick commerce and some other convenience delivery. In 2020 I also picked up the foodservice business for Blakemore, so I looked after the non-SPAR business at Blakemore. I left there in November 2023 and joined Kitwave in February 2024, working at WestCountry. It might be a different type of business, but it has very much given me the opportunity to draw on all of the different experience that I’ve got, and it has been absolutely fabulous.

What does your current role involve?

I’m managing director of WestCountry Foodservice. We have just gone through a process of merging two foodservice businesses together. The legacy businesses was MJ Baker, it was quite well known, Malcolm had quite a high profile for a regional business. That merged with WestCountry Fruit Sales, as we were. We launched a new site in September 2024 in Devon with an 80,000 square foot multi-temp distribution facility. First, we moved the legacy MJ Baker business into that. We then merged our back end and have put the WestCountry business in there. I lead the combined business, which has about 4,000 distribution points with deliveries 13 times a week. It’s different to a lot of other businesses in our relationships with our suppliers, which also extends into our relationships with growers and local producers. We’ve got a really strong artisanal and specialty range, as well as a range of locally grown products like root vegetables. The restaurant hospitality trade uses us as a primary route to market into a lot of hospitality outlets. I look after the combined team, which is really exciting, having the opportunity in a really mature marketplace, to bring two really mature businesses together with complimentary teams, skill sets, capabilities, ranges, to build something bigger and stronger and go after some real growth in our marketplace.

What are your goals for what you want to achieve in the role?

Growth is one of the principal objectives. We’ve got two businesses merged together and the power of one is significantly greater than the sum of the two parts. I’m looking to drive a lot of efficiencies. We’re doing a bit of network transformation at the moment, where we’re restructuring how we bring product to market to improve service, improve availability further and drive cost down. We’re in a marketplace where we can’t keep passing all of the costs that are passed to us on to our customers. We have to find novel ways of reducing our cost of servicing our end customer, which is the restaurant, so that they’re in a position to prosper as well. For me, driving a really efficient business that has got high standards is important and that is ultimately putting in place the foundation for us to grow strongly. We’ve got around 4,000 distribution points. It’s incredible, when we look at the two businesses coming together, only a couple of hundred customers were the same. Through MJ Baker, we’ve got a very strong cost sector focus, with really strong ranges, delivering to the healthcare and education sectors and lower end hospitality. In WestCountry, we’ve got a very strong focus on independent, free trade hospitality. We’ve got a customer set that can take complementary products we have, being able to bring our ranging together gives us the opportunity to sell much broader ranges, driving better efficiencies to customers. There is certainly the room to drive a lot of growth, predominantly through market penetration. In some regions, particularly in England beyond the Cornwall/Devon peninsula, there’s also a lot of room to grow market penetration of that, because we’ve got a really strong offer and a strong logistics operation to support us.

How is your company performing?

I think we’re doing well, there has been a lot of changes through our business in this year. Over the course of the year, both businesses have moved IT systems. ERPs have changed we’ve bought the teams together, so we’ve gone through a lot of change in that respect. We have brought on board some new processes, which have started to pay some dividends for us, in terms of ranging, but also service and cost. It is a challenging market, but we think we’re punching on weight. There have been a lot of cost headwinds that have hit, particularly in the hospitality sector. As a consequence of that, everybody’s having to fight a bit harder to ensure that we’re maintaining share of volume, share of wallets but the underlying performance is good at the moment, particularly given some of those market headwinds.

Why did WestCountry merge with MJ Baker?

I think a lot of it comes down to the opportunity to drive efficiencies. One of the benefits of being owned by the Kitwave group is that Kitwave has always shown a desire to invest where there is potential to drive synergies and growth. We had two businesses that have both been in premises for a long period of time but were not necessarily invested in to the level required. Each of those businesses had done a really fantastic job of driving as much as they could out of their existing operations, to the point where some of the operations were becoming inefficient just because of the volume going through sites which were not designed for that level of volume, or for some of the operational complexity, or to deal with different customer needs. Kitwave has invested in a new site for us, with an 80,000 square foot facility in Devon, which has simplified our operations significantly by giving us the space to operate. It gets us out of third-party storage, we have all of our assortments and our team in one place, which has given us a fantastic opportunity to drive a lot of efficiencies.

What will be the impact of the merger for WestCountry?

The principal impact of the merger for us is that we have got strong market penetration without necessarily basket penetration. Bringing complementary ranges together means that when we’re supplying a cost sector customer that maybe didn’t have access to as broad a range of produce before. We’re able to offer them a better solution, a one stop shop solution, growing efficiencies, growing the basket size. Likewise, the typical WestCountry hospitality customer would start with a large volume of produce and has expanded into ambient stores and general foodservice lines, but we’ve now got the capacity to service those customers with a much broader assortment of products, a lot more frozen, a lot more chilled. For our customers, we’re offering a real one stop shop solution, which for them is really important. Couple that with our service offer. We’re unique in that we offer 13 deliveries a week, customers can order up until 11.30pm and get the product delivered the next morning. If their morning service has been particularly strong or something unforecasted happens, they’re then in a position to put an order in by 11.30am and get it delivered the same afternoon. So we’re bringing an assortment of 6,500 lines, including best in class produce, artisanal products and a great everyday foodservice range across all temperature regimes, and we’re able to offer a really fast turnaround at a massively high level of service, which we know is really important for our customers, most of whom are looking to manage almost on a day to day basis.

Is Kitwave a member of a buying group?

Yes, we are. From a retail perspective, we are a member of the Unitas buying group and from a foodservice perspective, we are a member of Country Range. The foodservice group within Kitwave covers WestCountry Foodservice, Creed Foodservice which was acquired in September by Kitwave and Total Foodservice, which is combination of the Miller and Total Foodservice businesses and was acquired last year. So there is effectively three foodservice trading entities within the Kitwave group, Creed, Total and WestCountry, and we’re all in the Country Range group, and very much enjoy the benefits of that.

What benefits do you get from being a member of Country Range?

The principal one, I think, is own brand. Country Range Group has got a range of about 800 own brand items across the chilled, ambient and frozen categories, some of the products within that are best in class solutions, they have won a lot of awards for their own brand. For us, the ability to drive customer loyalty and to improve the consistency of the offer that we give the chef is really important to us. Moving into an environment where we’ve got not only a very broad but very deep own brand assortment helps to simplify our ranging. From a range architecture perspective, we can always start with Country Range Group and then look to layer better and best on top of that. But it gives our customers the opportunity to simplify the way that they buy. They also trust the Country Range Group brand. One of the other benefits for us is the use of some of the shared services. We get a lot of product control and product information through the centre. So CRG put all of their products through Erudus, which enables our management for our e-commerce solutions to work seamlessly, and they also supply a lot of central marketing collateral. When we’re looking to put not only brochures and things like that together, but food guides, sector specific guides, they’re in a position where they’ll do sector specific work and offer that to all of the members. It effectively means that a mid-sized food service operator, which is what we are, is able to compete in terms of collateral on IP with some of the multinationals that have got really large data teams.

How far is the geographical reach of your business?

We operate in Devon and Cornwall, that’s our prime space. We’ve got sites in Falmouth, St Austell and Newton Abbott in Devon. Geographically, we cover Devon and Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. We go out past Weymouth on the south coast and head a little bit more across the southeast and then up to Bristol and Bath and they’re all serviced out of Newton Abbott. We’re talking about 90 minutes or so from base, outside of that we start to lose the benefit, just because of the sheer mileage evolved.

Do you have an e-commerce site for your customers?

Yes, we do, it’s been a really big development for us. We as West Country didn’t offer an e-commerce solution before, all of our orders were captured by our telesales team. We process up to 1200 orders a day by telesales, capture, it’s quite a big part of our business. In September 2024, we had a soft launch and took to market westcountry.co.uk, which is fantastic. We’ve worked with a team at Foodservice Online to develop that. We’ve got probably the highest speed, easiest to use web page, certainly across our customer area so we’re really proud of what we’ve been able to develop. We’ve had really strong adoption levels from our customers and so far, I think we’ve only had one non-five star review. We’re at 500 or 600 views and counting, and only one of them came through a four-star review so from that perspective, the feedback from our customers has been really strong. We’re also working with Foodservice Online, developing our AI order capture capability. A lot of our orders have been delivered by voice to customers, either speaking to telesales operators or leaving voicemail messages on our answering machine. We’re in the process of using some AI, which will do a voice analysis, understand what the customer is ordering, who they’re ordering for, when they need it by and with a bit of machine learning, we’re going around and checking that against the customer’s purchase history, which means that the order is then being largely keyed by AI with one of our team then checking that to ensure its accuracy. It is really great, because that will give us the ability to improve the quality of our orders, because there’s less orders lost in translation. It also means we can process them faster, which means that we can pick them faster, potentially giving our customers extra time to get their orders in or potentially enabling us to start serving broader geographies as well. So, we’re really excited about the work that we’re doing on that front.

How digital is your business, and do you offer any IT support for your members e.g. ordering apps, online support, delivery tracking?

Yes, we do a lot, we’re in the process of stitching it all together. We’re going live with the WestCountry web page. From an IT perspective, we’re well supported by the Kitwave group. We use the Sword software. We all operate on a standard ERP, which is great, because it gives us the ability to hang a lot of other technology off the back of that. We scan pick in our Newton Abbot site, we’re in the process of trying voice picking. Voice picking for us is really important for fruit and veg, because customers order fruit and veg in lots of different ways. We have to manage our systems in lots of different ways as a consequence, because somebody might ring up and order a kilo of tomatoes, a box of tomatoes, six tomatoes, they’ll order it in a way that suits them, and we need to be able to process that, and it’s typically been quite a manual process. Voice will offer us the ability both to improve our accuracy, but also the efficiency of the pick. From a tech perspective, we have scan picking and voice pick. From a customer perspective, we have the web and app, we’ve got an iOS app and a Play Store app. Our vehicles are all tracked, which helps us to manage both driver safety and efficiency. It also gives us the ability to talk with customers about where their delivery is. The customer will know where their delivery is in the cycle. We’ve got E pod on our roadmap for next year, which will mean that we’ll be able to put that where is my order capability in the app, which will take another barrier down on the customer knowing exactly where their delivery is going to be. There’s a lot going on. Our teams use WhatsApp Business and those platforms also give you the ability to drive some chat-like sales. It’s really important for us when we get in fresh produce in particular. A lot of packaged goods will come through and will be well signposted – at the point we start getting the first new tomatoes or asparagus in a season, the growers can snap a photo of the product coming out of the ground and get it into our buyers. Buyers might grab another shot when the product comes in. We can use WhatsApp to push that to the chefs, push it to our customers and literally have a product being served that wasn’t listed in the morning, and can be on the dinner plates and in service in the evening because of the way that we work through the supply chain and push that availability to our customers.

How many products does your business supply and what categories do you cover?

We’re at about 6,000 at the moment, we’re in flux because of the produce range. We cover the chilled, frozen and ambient categories. The frozen categories cover everything you would expect – frozen meats, chips, pastries and morning goods. We’ve got a broad chilled range, but we augment that with a lot of local chilled. We work with a lot of local charcuterie and cheese producers. Our ambient range is a relatively standard foodservice range, everything is safe for schools or care homes.

Are there any new products in the ranges you want to talk about?

From a new product perspective, we’ve got about 450 of those available. So we’re going through the management, managing the transition, and we’re harmonising the ranges across the business. In February and March, we will start our category councils, where we’ve got a program laid out between our sales and commercial team, just to update range reviews and ensure that we’re bringing through and expanding categories where we need to do so but we’ll do it in the right way. We will do it database-led, customer-led and insight-led.

How has the wholesale industry changed in recent years?

I think the wholesale industry is a very together industry. Covid brought wholesalers together, the FWD did a very good job in holding it together. I think buying groups have done a very good job in bringing members that maybe sat on the periphery a bit more into conversation a lot more. I think uk.com has got a lot of headwinds, National Insurance increases, all of the associated cost increases we’ve seen in the last few years, minimum wage and the pressure that that puts on our customers. I think we’ve seen the wholesale industry come together and work to drive a more efficient industry and to that end, I think it’s quite a good place to be. Generally, agendas are shared and as a place to work and operate, it’s in good health.