Morrisons
Alongside its retail operations, Morrisons is the UK's second largest fresh food manufacturer. It buys many of its fresh products directly from farmers and fishermen, processes products through its own manufacturing sites and abattoirs and distributes through its own network, the only British supermarket to do so.
TBBT benefits from a direct relationship with many of its sites too – collecting eggs from the Chippenham team, potatoes from Gadbrook, bakery items from Rathbones in Wakefield and meat from its Farmer’s Boy sites. It’s a UK-wide operation, bringing surplus food into TBBT from across the country.
Morrisons has been with TBBT since we launched in 2016. Five years on and the supermarket giant is unlocking new surplus from across its own internal supply chain – from farms to factories and providing vital logistics support.
The crisis in haulage remains one of the biggest issues to affect the food industry in 2021, so TBBT could not be more grateful to the vital support from Morrisons and its transport team in keeping TBBT supplied with quality surplus throughout the year. In the summer of 2021, TBBT faced losing 80-100 pallets of food a month, yet Morrisons rose to the challenge and helped keep TBBT’s members fed across the summer and beyond.
“I’ve got to say, they’ve been outstanding.”
As well as TBBT’s long established daily collections from Morrisons site near Bury, working with its own logistics partners Romac, Morrisons opened up its logistics centre in Bridgewater near Bristol enabling TBBT to collect an additional 30+ tonnes of food a month.
Romac’s warehouse acts as one of Morrisons central distribution points, receiving goods from across the country and then sending them out to Morrisons supermarkets. Working in partnership with them and Morrisons means that TBBT has been to collect Morrisons products from one central location, simplifying logistics and offering Morrisons and Romac a straightforward way to pass on edible surplus.
But this wouldn’t be possible with the brilliant support of the transport team who have provided HGVs or partnered TBBT with other transport providers in a network of complex logistical support.
As one of the UK’s biggest supermarket operators, Morrisons is unique in that is grows, produces and owns its whole ‘own label’ supply chain – anything in Morrisons packaging has been made by Morrisons directly. As a result, it has producers across the country working in every area of food production and TBBT also benefits from a direct relationship with many individual sites too – collecting eggs from the Chippenham team, potatoes from Gadbrook, bakery items from Rathbones in Wakefield and meat from its Farmer’s Boy sites. It’s a UK-wide operation, bringing surplus food into TBBT from across the country.
TBBT has its own fleet of vans which used to do five or six pick-ups a day before the pandemic-fuelled haulage crisis. Now the team are doing 15 – 16 collections every day, so the additional logistics support from Morrisons, especially for bulk surplus, has been nothing short of mission critical. By doing so, TBBT is benefitting from almost 700 tonnes of food in 2021 alone – that’s an amazing 1.6 million meals.
