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Fully Automated Warehouse for Fresh Produce Relies on IFCO RPCs
Finnish retailer SOK looks to reusable containers from IFCO to help optimize its automated fulfillment system for fresh fruit and vegetables
A unique logistics center run by SOK near Helsinki is one of the first food retail logistics centers in the world to fully automate fruit and vegetables. The center relies on reusable containers from IFCO, the leading supplier of reusable packaging solutions for fresh products. In the fully automated system, IFCO reusable containers can fully exploit their strengths.
Bringing fresh fruits and vegetables from grower to vendor is a race against time. Often, only hours elapse between receipt of products in the distribution center and shipping to the customer. In order to be able to deliver quickly, reliably and cost-effectively, Finland’s largest retailer SOK opened a fully automated fresh food store near Helsinki in mid-2017. Half of all food sold in the country is handled there. SOK uses reusable plastic containers (RPCs) from IFCO because they perfectly meet the requirements of automated systems.
The capacity of the logistics center exceeds 1.2 million units per day and handling around 21,000 different items. More than a million RPCs from IFCO transport 70% of all fruit, food and bread products through the warehouse each month. From mid-2019, Inex Oy, the logistics subsidiary of SOK, intends to ship most of the fruit and vegetable range with RPCs, equivalent to a volume of 15 to 16 million IFCO reusable containers per year.
Strengths of reusable containers: moisture-resistant, stackable, stable
“It was particularly important to the customer to avoid tilting the boxes,” explains IFCO CEO Wolfgang Orgeldinger. “That’s why he wanted to work with a high percentage of plastic crates right from the start.” Inside the automated warehouse, a complex system of conveyor belts, elevators and sheet grippers sorts products and distributes them efficiently to consignments. This requires standardized, absolutely stable and stackable boxes to securely stack different products. IFCO guarantees minimum dimensional tolerances and a robust construction – even under extreme conditions.
In the warehouse, the humidity can be up to 80 percent – which does not change the properties of IFCO’s RPCs. They are moisture resistant and still well ventilated. “The shape and stability of the boxes are crucial in automated systems,” says Mikko Kymäläinen, Logistics Manager at Inex Oy – a key argument for his company to use IFCO reusable containers. “When crates absorb moisture and soften, they can no longer be handled in automated processes.”
The Helsinki facility also benefits from the additional benefits offered by IFCO reusable containers: the amount of waste is reduced by 85 percent compared with disposable containers. Empty and folded, the RPCs are very flat. This saves space in the warehouse and on the transport pallets. With a minimum number of vehicles, around 60,000 empty RPCs per day can be transported from the warehouse to the IFCO service center. There, the load carriers are inspected and cleaned according to the applicable hygiene regulations in order to make them available again for the next cycle in top quality. Through this pooling principle, all parties not only save money, but also reduce their environmental footprint.