Food transport for gourmet tastes

One afternoon just before 4 pm, Dominic Belanger’s phone rang furiously with an urgent request. Verbau, a Belgian manufacturer of gourmet desserts and a new warehouse customer of DACHSER’s branch in Alsdorf near Aachen, Germany, had five pallets of products with short expiration dates that needed to be at the central warehouse of supermarket giant REWE in Oppeano (Verona, Italy) by the afternoon of the next day.

 

No easy task; organising direct transport in such a short time would be impossible. But the case turned out to be a perfect demonstration of how a crack logistics team with a high-performance network at its disposal can respond with the utmost flexibility when every minute counts. In Alsdorf, Dominic Belanger and his colleague Stefano Francini threw themselves into the task, pulling out all the stops to get the shipment on the road. The team needed to ensure the goods would be on time to meet every connection along the route so that the shipment could be delivered within the required timeframe. To achieve this, they called on colleagues Atila Iles at the Eurohub in Erlensee near Frankfurt and Marco Brunelli and Laura Vicenzoni from Pradelle, DACHSER’s Italian branch near Verona.

“The teams from the various branches worked smoothly and seamlessly together,” recalls Dominic Belanger as he looks back on the situation. By 4.59 pm, the pallets had already been loaded and were on their way to Erlensee. Perfect timing! The urgent shipment reached Erlensee at 9.09 pm, leaving ample time for loading onto the truck that plies the regular scheduled service to Pradelle. It left the yard in Erlensee punctually at 18 minutes past midnight, and the five pallets arrived at the little town near Verona at 1.58 pm the following day. A local truck was waiting to whisk the shipment off to Oppeano and REWE’s central warehouse, where it reached its destination at 3 pm. After a journey of over 1,100 kilometres, completed in only 22 hours, the delivery papers were finally stamped. Job done!

Andreas Köhn, Manager Food Contract Logistics at DACHSER in Alsdorf, looks back on the achievement of his team with enormous pride: “Scenarios like this deliver impressive proof to our customers that challenging and time-sensitive transport operations of this kind are all in a day’s work for us and our powerful network – smooth, lean and highly efficient.”