PepsiCo completes £14m distribution centre investment
Marked as one of the company’s biggest logistics investments in the UK, the new building has been established with ‘state-of-the-art’ equipment and technology that will increase the storage capacity at site by 29%.
The manufacturer said the investment will enable it to better meet growing demand for its Walkers brand crisps – previously PepsiCo relied on overspill sites that required crisps to be stored and transported to other locations.
Cutting road miles
Now, more crisps can be stored on-site, taking over 600,000km off the road in transportation – the equivalent to travelling around the world 15 times – and annual savings of over 400 tonnes of carbon dioxide as a result.
Andy Smethurst, PepsiCo SRDC site lead, said: “After two years of planning and execution, our new SRDC building is now open for business, and set to dramatically change our logistics operation.
“It will create more efficiencies, more capacity, and importantly also take miles off the road so we can reduce our carbon footprint. We’re confident that this will allow us to serve our retail customers with more agility, while also ensuring the future success of our distribution centre.”
Sustainability strategy
PepsiCo’s Leicester investment formed part of its pep+ strategy aimed at boosting sustainability within the business, with plans to build a circular and inclusive value chain that’s “better for consumers and the planet”.
The SRDC upgrade followed a £24.5m into PepsiCo’s Walkers crisp factory in Lincoln in order to upgrade its facilities, meet growing demand and secure the future of the site.
The investment would lead to existing machinery at the long-standing city centre site being replaced by new equipment, including a compact packaging machine that it claimed would help remove more packaging from its supply chain.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) has invested £28m into its manufacturing site in Sidcup to fund the installation of a new canning line.
