VMI seals it for Salvesen

The ability to support vendor managed inventory (VMI) was key to temperature-controlled logistics specialist Christian Salvesen winning a five-year contract worth up to £45M from own-label cake manufacturer Inter Link Foods, it claimed.

Under VMI, Salvesen will apply its proprietary warehouse management system to every aspect of sales, stock control, forecasting and production, ensuring that supply is constantly matched to demand, said Christian Salvesen.

Inter Link, which has a turnover of £130M, is based in Blackburn and has 11 UK factories and one in Poland. It makes the Soreen malt and fruit loaves and claimed to be the largest UK producer of mince pies and fairy cakes.

The contract with Christian Salvesen, which creates 100 jobs in Warrington, will cover deliveries of finished products to regional supermarket distribution centres as well as raw products to Interlink's bakeries.

In separate deals, freight firm Wincanton has won a three-year contract to manage all of soft drink firm Britvic's primary transport and a three-year extension of its contract to manage Britvic's national distribution centre at Lutterworth in Leicestershire. As part of the contract, Wincanton will look to save costs by introducing more backhauling of goods.

Meanwhile, shadow trade and industry minister Alan Duncan has opened Cert drinks network's new 21,800m2 bonded distribution centre at Lutterworth, which expects to be handling 40M cases of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks by the end of the year.