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Lynas Food Service expands to meet growing demands with Jungheinrich

Jungheinrich UK is helping to support the expansion of the largest family-operated Foodservice Company in Ireland, Lynas Food Service, through the deployment of a range of intelligent materials handling equipment across several sites.

A third-generation family-run business for over seventy years, Lynas Food Service provides over 6000 ambient, chilled, frozen and non-foods products to organisations and services across Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and Scotland, including many large hotel chains, restaurants, schools and prisons. As a fast-growing company, the wholesaler was outgrowing its existing warehouses, and had limited capacity to take on new customers and opportunities at its current rate. With a specific need for more pallet spaces, in 2019, the company made the decision to expand its warehouse, creating an additional 4,00 ambient pallet spaces from a 75m x 30m x 15m extension.

With additional warehouse space also came the additional need for machinery to support its expansion and to meet growing demands. As such, it turned to Jungheinrich to explore potential options and proceeded with two EKX 516 VNA trucks, the new generation of high-rise stackers.

To support the 15-metre high racking, Maurice Devenney, Group Facilities and H&S Manager at Lynas Food Services was impressed with Jungheinrich’s VNA trucks: “Jungheinrich’s VNA order pickers were exactly what we needed. Especially from a health and safety point of view, with these machines, the operator is eye level to the pallet no matter where he is placing it, whether it’s two meters high or 15 meters.

“With other available options, the operator consistently remains lower when placing the pallet at height, and instead has to depend on cameras and personal skills, which isn’t as reliable. Jungheinrich’s VNA order pickers are therefore ideal for our operations.” 

In addition to the VNA trucks, Jungheinrich also supplied the wholesaler with ten ERE 125 electric pallet trucks to deploy in its warehouses in Coleraine and Dublin, as well as counterbalance trucks and other manual handling trucks for the food outlets and meat plant.

As a nearly 24 x 7 operation, it’s vital for Lynas Food Services to have access to strong, robust and reliable machinery. In order to maintain business consistency, it’s essential for the company to minimise down-time as much as possible. To ensure this requirement is met, Jungheinrich has provided a consistent loop of communication, with engineers available on the same day or next day to fix any issues that arise.

Since the implementation of the ERE pallet trucks in August 2019, and the VNA order pickers in November 2019, Lynas Food Services has seen numerous improvements, with the main benefit being the reduction in the damage to racking. Maurice explains: “One of our main problems was the amount of damage we had to racking, which resulted in the loss of pallet spaces, and the risk to health and safety. We have seen a significant reduction in the damage to racking in our expanded part of the warehouse since we implemented the VNA order pickers in November”.

As well as the reduction in damage, Maurice and the team at Lynas Food Services have also seen increased productivity in their workforce. By removing the need for employees to manually operate their pallet trucks and walk from each side of the warehouse, the workforce are now able to utilise the electronic ride-on format to move between the pallet’s at a speed of 10km/h, helping to increase their production speed and ability to manage increased demand.

Lynas Food Service is continuing to grow and expand with plans for a new warehouse in Dublin and several other food outlets. Understanding there will be a need for reach trucks in the next space, Maurice claims that it’s a ‘no-brainer’ from their experience with Jungheinrich that it will deploy four to six Jungheinrich trucks after proving their reliability and robustness.

Steve Richmond, Director of Logistics Systems at Jungheinrich adds: “Lynas Foods has maximised its storage capacity, efficiency and productivity across its sites through the deployment of Jungheinrich VNA order pickers, ERE pallet trucks and additional machinery. Despite challenging times, with certain industries continuing to grow and meet accelerated demand, the implementation of innovative technology and solutions is necessary to help transform operational performance, reliability and safety within businesses. We look forward to developing our relationship even further and helping them and other businesses in Northern Ireland to expand and meet demand in the future.” 

Maurice concludes: “The team at Jungheinrich is dependable and has incredibly knowledgeable experts in logistics. They have provided us with options which we never would have considered and continue to look after us and our machinery. We have a couple of other machines in our warehouse, but we’ve found Jungheinrich to be the most reliable model. If we ever have an issue, Jungheinrich instantly arranges for an engineer to come to our site to fix it, while going above and beyond to check our other machines and identify any problems before they arise, which helps us save time and reduce any costs. We’re excited to continue our work with Jungheinrich moving forward as we continue to expand.”