Food and drink import and export specialist Kinship Logistics is in a position to offer a 3PL service to clients in London and across the UK that provides all the benefits of an organisation with a 60-year heritage of supplying the food and drink industry and an excellent track record.
Kinship Logistics is based across two strategically located hubs around London. The North London Luton-based hub provides excellent access to the Midlands and the North of England, whilst the London Gateway port centric hub provides great accessibility to both global importers and domestic exporters. Operating a road transport hub from one of the UKs biggest entry and exit points provides an excellent value chain solution for UK companies.
Kinship’s location, facilities, operations, capacity and additional value adding services such as customs clearance and warehousing, make it the ideal 3PL partner for any company looking for a chilled logistics partner.
Clare Linstead, Group Sales Director, said:
“Around 80% of our volume is bananas, supplying the majority of the major supermarkets in large volumes on a daily basis.
“Bananas are a steady product – always required in significant volumes and without any seasonal peaks and troughs, and so we have accurate forecasts for what vehicles we will be sending where, when and at what capacity – and that allows us to offer not just an efficient 3PL service but a very competitively priced one.
“Particularly for return journeys, we’ve adopted an aggressive growth strategy because we want to see our vehicles coming back loaded rather than empty, to improve efficiency and cut carbon footprints for us and our potential customers.
“Anyone with a requirement for logistics to and from London Gateway should be talking to us about our offering.”
Kinship provides a complete end-to-end solution, a vertically integrated model that offers the fastest and most cost-effective route to market for any perishable commodities coming into and passing out of London Gateway.
Cross docking at the port, transferring commodities directly from shipping container to vehicle or vice-versa, cuts time and costs – goods are often on site less than four hours before beginning their onward journey to the customer. Where storage, ripening, packing or order processing is required, Kinship’s sister business Halo Value Added Services’ temperature-controlled warehouse ensures optimum conditions for the goods until they are ready for transportation.
Although tropical fruit is the mainstay of operations, there is capacity for all perishable goods, frozen meat and beverages. Multi-temperature-controlled vehicles allow the transportation of the full spectrum of items, from frozen to ambient. Units are tracked by location and temperature so the client has full knowledge of consignments throughout and temperature history can be provided live and historically.
Expertise in importing and processing its own consignments puts Kinship Logistics in a position to provide an efficient customs and portside paperwork service from all major UK entry and exit points by land, sea and air to its clients, reducing the administration burden and saving time and cost that would otherwise fall onto the customer.
Clare Linstead added:
“Building relationships with importers and exporters who can benefit from our services is something we’re always keen to do. As a food and drink specialist, we’ve got everything covered in terms of what is required to keep goods in perfect conditions throughout their journey to the customer.
“As well as Kinship Logistics, we also have Kinetic, our driver agency that gives us complete control when it comes to ensuring not only that our drivers are fully trained and assessed to ensure the high standards we and our customers expect, but that we have a readily available resource ready to meet additional requirements and seasonal needs.
“Having built our operation to meet our own needs and deliver the level of service we expect, we can pass the benefits of our facilities, knowledge and experience in the complex and highly regulated world of food and beverages on to customers throughout the UK at what I think they’ll find is an extremely competitive price point.”
Find out more about Kinship Logistics and Halo Value Added Services at shprattgroup.com