Culina contract packing deal significantly boosts turnover

Thomas van Mourik, chief executive of Culina, said: "We made £2-3m from contract packing in year one and will add a further £5m to that this year, so our total annual turnover from contract packing will be £7-8m."

Culina now offers contract packing from all its 10 warehousing sites, cutting food manufacturers' costs by negating the need for goods to be transported to separate locations for packing. A joint venture with food contract packing firm IPS, which was announced in March, enabled the move. Culina now offers multi-; selection; promotional or added value packing; hermetically-sealed bagging; flow wrapping; cartoning; sleeving; shrinkwrapping; labelling; metal detection and re-casing.

The deal has created a new company, Culina IPS Contract Packing.

"We're using this as a platform to sell our services," said van Mourik. "IPS has a lot of food customers that could become customers of Culina." The venture will also give processors more flexibility over packaging options, offering the ability for them to create a variety of pack formats.

The initiative would not only reduce customers' logistics costs, but also road miles and associated carbon emissions, said Mourik. "You could probably halve the number of vehicles transporting packaged goods and you wouldn't have to ship product around the UK for packaging."

Culina's merger of chilled consolidation activities with Wincanton in 2009, incorporating Wincanton's Trafford Park and Gloucester multi-user sites, added £76m worth of business, creating a total potential annual turnover of £200m. And Culina formed Culina SHS Ireland, a joint venture with SHS Group taking Culina's services to processors supplying Ireland, in January.

The company also announced a contract to provide Milk Link's third-party logistics requirements in April. But van Mourik said he would focus on business consolidation for the rest of this year.

Culina handles branded and own-label items, deriving about £40m of turnover from ambient storage and distribution. Business with Müller Dairy UK generates about 60% of its turnover.