“We would have lost customers”: Kalsec opens Dutch warehouse amid Brexit concerns
15 Dec 2021 | Kalsec
Ahead of supply chain turbulence due to Brexit, ingredient supplier Kalsec has moved its EU business from the UK to continental Europe. In a race against the clock, the Netherlands warehouse went from empty to functional in ten weeks. The facility now serves growing demand from Europe, including Ireland, which has proved easier to ship to from Holland than the UK.
This is Missy Green from FIE 2021.
I'm here with Wim from Caltech, and he's going to tell us about a recent move the company made in light of Brexit.
So Wim, what led to the decision to move the EU business to continental Europe?
The main reason for that was Brexit that was coming towards us, but it's a combination of two things.
1st, 1st was Brexit.
Second was the further growth that we are seeing at the moment in continental Europe.
So when we put the two together, we finally made the decision to move the logistics center from the UK to continental Europe.
And we did that by opening a new warehouse in the Netherlands to serve all our EU customers from this new warehouse and that also includes the the customers that we have in Ireland because Ireland is still part of the EU and we found out that it's easier to serve them from an EU country than to continue to serve them from the UK and I think it was a smart move for us to do if we if we hadn't done that.
Then I think it would have resulted in losing quite a lot of our customers because at the beginning of this year, we have tried to deliver some of our products to customers in the EU from the UK but we found out that some of those deliveries, they left us early January and they were only delivered early April to the customer, so it really took a long time to get the products finally delivered to the customer.
And the reason for that was that the documents weren't correct, done by all the suppliers, and a lot of our goods are going in consolidated shipments from the UK to the EU, and we were aware of how everything needed to be documented, but we found out that there are a lot of companies in the UK that never exported to non-EU countries before and so a lot of the documents were missing.
And due to that, the truck didn't move and it took really a long time before it finally got delivered to the customer.
So did Calsec foresee that this was coming and take action before Brexit actually took effect?
Yes, so we were made aware of Brexit already a long time ago, but it took quite a while before we finally understood what that was going to mean to us.
So in the 3rd quarter of 2020, we decided to open our own warehouse in the Netherlands.
So we got the key of a new facility the 1st of November 2020, and that gave us two months to get everything operational.
That was a very short time because we started with two empty halls and we had to get the wrecking in there.
We had to get reefer containers in there for refrigerated products.
We had to hire people to run the operation, so.
By mid January we were completely done, so we had our first deliveries going out of the Dutch warehouse by mid January.
So within 10 weeks we got it all installed and operational to run.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
