Refrigerated Container Season Approaches
Thursday, 9th July 2009
Christmas comes early every year for us at Bullmans. The festive period generates an enormous amount of shipping as extra produce is exported but mainly imported to the U.K to meet the increased consumer demand over Christmas and New Year, the vast majority by container.
U.K stores have to plan early and preparations for Christmas, which is one of the busiest periods in retail, begin almost as soon as it is over.
Orders are placed for additional stock and seasonal produce which is shipped in mostly via containers. Quite often the stores conventional storage facilities cannot cope with this temporary influx of goods and additional storage space is required. Between September and January if you look in the corner of many high street supermarket car parks you will see ISO shipping containers, both conventional dry van containers and refrigerated containers.
Coldstorage is particularly important for many supermarkets as turkeys and all those nice Christmas treats we enjoy over the festive period quite often require temperature controlled storage. Supermarkets in particular enjoy the flexibility that the short term hire of cold storage, refrigerated shipping containers provides. Both 20 foot and 40 foot refrigerated containers or reefers as they are commonly known are hired by stores and supermarkets. These refrigerated containers are modified and differ from marine ISO shipping containers as quite often they will have flat aluminium chequer plate floors, butchers doors, man trapped panic alarms, lighting, loading ramps and more recently low noise machinery.