Essential Fruit contracts with NFT to use its Tilbury facility
The contract, which includes importing and exporting of products, was awarded to NFT in large part because of the geographical advantages offered by NFT’s new port-centric London facility located at the Port of Tilbury, based at Thurrock in Essex.
Essential Fruit is a fruit importer, providing raw materials for pre-packed fruit salads, juice-based drinks and many other value-added food products that contain real fruit.
Year-round supply
It deals mainly with citrus fruits and sources worldwide from more than 50 different producers in both the northern and southern hemispheres, which enables it to provide a constant year-round supply of produce.
NFT’s Tilbury facility is claimed to be the largest quayside chilled food distribution hub in Europe.
It is said to offer ‘end-to-end’ logistics, raising supply chain efficiency and providing opportunities to cut distribution costs, food waste and food miles by up to 20%.
The contract with Essential Fruit is a six-month rolling deal, because of the seasonal nature of the business.
UK and European markets
As part of the initial contract, NFT is developing a service for the company, which will involve the collection of containers, storage handling and distribution both to the UK and European markets of up to 6,000 pallets a week.
“Essential Fruit imports and exports fruit products from all around the world and the port-centric chilled capability of NFT London, coupled with the network infrastructure of the wider NFT business has provided a superior strategic location for our operations into and out of the UK,’’ said Dan Cahill, md of Essential Fruit.
Dale Fiddy, strategic development director at NFT, said: “Essential Fruit uses most of the ports in the south east of England and is a great example of NFT London providing commercial advantage, regardless of the port of entry into the UK.”
