UK: 70,000 bananas per week with new Fyffes facility
Fyffes, a £720 million business which sells 44 million cases of fruit in Europe each year, has opened a new 60,000 sq ft facility to replace a smaller building they had used nearby.
LB Foster, of Troon Industrial Area, Leicester, said the contract included building and installing production lines and a 100-yard long pallet conveyor that can process 70,000 bananas a week.
LB Foster Materials Handling – previously called CL Logistics – supplies handling and storage systems all over the world. The company has 30 staff after bringing in five new workers last year, including an operations manager and several project managers.
George Kennedy, operations director for Fyffes, said they outgrew their original Wakefield depot so located to a bigger site where they could increase production capacity by up to 50 per cent.
He said: "We needed a safe and efficient way of transporting the pallets of bananas from the unloading bays around the edge of our large production area to the ripening rooms. There was also a requirement for six complete production lines to include belt and roller conveyors together with packing benches for up to 160 staff.
"Automating the movement of bananas with a pallet conveyor running around the production area has given us some financial benefits, but the main purpose of the solution was to ensure the health and safety of our staff working in that area – which it has done."
Source: leicestermercury.co.uk
