Makro Netherlands has announced the opening of a new delivery depot to optimise its Food Service Distribution (FSD) business in the Netherlands.
The new depot in Dordrecht will bundle deliveries as a central warehouse and delivery hub, the wholesaler noted.
It will be achieved through the networking of the depot and selected wholesale stores, which serve as local delivery hubs in the different regions.
New Structure
As part of the new structure, all suppliers will only deliver to the depot in Dordrecht, where the orders for HoReCa customers are picked and packaged and forwarded for the 'last mile' to the local hubs in Nuth, Leeuwarden, Amsterdam and Duiven.
Only fresh fruit and vegetables are delivered directly to the local hubs, where these items are added to the deliveries and consolidated.
The new depot bundles more than 7,000 products on an area of about 6,700 square metres, and around 70 truckloads of deliveries are completed every day.
sCore Strategy
Makro described the opening of the depot as an 'important milestone' for the implementation of its local 'sCore strategy', which seeks to expand the delivery service as the largest growth lever within its multichannel business model and triple delivery sales across the group by 2030.
The retailer says the basis for this is, on the one hand, the targeted expansion of the delivery infrastructure to enable delivery both from existing stores (out-of-store delivery, OOS) and via specific depots.
Metro's store network currently comprises 567 stores with OOS delivery and 64 depots (as of 30 September 2022).
© 2023 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest supply chain news. Article by Robert McHugh. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
