Cold storage firm Oakland International has big plans to create 2,500 jobs and massively simplify food supply chains with a unique new industry hub. Josh Brooks speaks to Oakland’s founder to find out more
Most of the time as a contract packer, the business is all about being reactive to your clients’ wishes, flexing production and dealing with the peaks and troughs of trade that are an occupational hazard. Of course, there is some new product development and no doubt regulatory compliance to deal with; but at the end of the day, the biggest worries are about getting the product out of the door for the best price possible.
But once in a while, a project comes along where a contract manufacturer or packer changes the game for the market around it and even the industry. And that is exactly what cold storage specialist Oakland International is about to do.
The company has revealed – in an exclusive interview with The Contract Packer – plans to build a 100-acre food park on land it owns next to its factory in Redditch.
The park would be home to food manu-facturers, be they big or small. But more than that, it would offer buildings that are specifically designed for the food business, with strong bio-security and in line with BRC standards; links to schools and university food academics; research and development facilities; dedicated supply chain facilities including copacking; and sound sustainability credentials, with an aim for the park to be carbon neutral.
Dean Attwell, Oakland International’s managing director, who founded the business in the late 1990’s with his wife Sallie, says the £65m project will create a unique facility in Europe that will have critical mass and attract buyers from retailers across the UK and beyond. “Retailers need to shorten their supply chains,” he says.
It’s a hugely ambitious plan, and it’s not quite there yet – a planning application is due to be submitted for the project during the summer, while Oakland is in the process of bringing a development partner on board. But a number of food companies have, Attwell says, signed letters of intent to take space on the park, which could create up to 2,500 jobs for the local economy.
Touchpoints
The food park, when it opens, will help solve two of the issues that Attwell sees as the biggest challenges to contract packers and the food industry: collaboration across the supply chain, and the multitude of touchpoints that food buyers need to deal with.
“The biggest thing is long-term collaboration. There’s a huge amount of potential for collaboration in the supply chain. We have some good long-term relationships but we can make more. The problem with not having long-term collaboration is that you end up doing smaller jobs, so you don’t get the volume and you can’t get the price point. So it’s then very difficult to get the listing. Whereas in a longer-term partnership, you can maybe share some risk, but you can hit the price point and you’ve got a better chance of getting the listing.”
Simplifying the supply chain is also a crucial challenge, Attwell says, not least in the wake of the horsemeat scandal earlier this year, which exposed the complexity of supply chains through Europe. As a result, it is increasingly attractive to reduce the number of touchpoints in that supply chain. “Retailers need to shorten their supply chains and as a supplier, you need to be offering full traceability,” he argues.
The Redditch food park will help. It’s a major plan for a company whose roots go back only to 1998, when the Attwells set up the business as an egg processing firm. It moved into cold storage – now its main activity – in 2000 and at around the same time started offering contract packing services such as picking and packing and distribution for retailers and catering chains. “We didn’t even know it was called contract packing at the time,” Attwell recalls.
A further move into contract packing came with the 2004 acquisition of Deltex, a Birmingham-based copacker that supplier food and FMCG products. Further work came in the form of high-care packing, such as a food product for Unilever that included exactly the right quantity of the ingredients of a dish and was designed to allow non-cooks to whip up gourmet meals. The hurdle, Attwell says, was that when a product became successful, often the client would then bring production in-house. “It was good fun, but not regular enough for us, so we moved away,” he adds.
Today, Oakland’s main business is in cold storage and the company specialises in tempering – that is, bringing food that is frozen up to a chilled temperature under controlled conditions. Products include party food, ready meals, cakes, bread, steak and more, while clients include most of the major supermarkets. The business employs 210 people and operates in three parts – Oakland International, which has sales of around £14m; a wholesale division, which turns over £8m; and a smaller, £1m-turnover Irish operation that launched in 2009 and operates as a import/export hub between the Irish and British markets.
But with the help of the food park, the Attwells see the business growing enormously in the coming years. A 10-year plan at the company is targeting sales of £70m and a workforce of around 1,100. With the company tracking, according to Dean Attwell, 20% annual growth at the moment, you wouldn’t bet against the couple achieving that aim. And, just maybe, making a big impact on the UK food business.
