Automation advances are not slowing job creation down for one of the hero firms to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic.
Paneltex, headquartered on Hull’s Kingston International Business Park, produces the refrigerated vehicle bodies that now proliferate neighbourhoods - as the supermarket comes to our door in 3.5 tonne format.
It has just launched its latest factory on Sutton Fields Industrial Estate, having secured substantial funding support as a final act of Humber Local Enterprise Partnership.
The capital injection helped support the dramatic growth seen as major export wins were twinned with a huge order increase on the domestic front.
Chris Berridge, managing director, said: “We’re at 580 staff now, and it shows what has happened through the pandemic.
“The demand for food home delivery vehicles has just gone mad. We have responded to that the best we can and adjusted our output.
“The pandemic has brought difficult times to work, we are not as efficient as we normally would be, and it has been quite a challenge. On top of this we have also had export expansion as well, which we were planning for.”
While it has done work in European markets, major strides are being made in North America - principally with Sobeys, Canada’s self-appointed ‘family grocery store’.
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And a new way of working has been adopted to serve the market, and ease the Atlantic crossing.
“We are doing it in kit form, the new factory is about producing very similar products tailored to suit North American vehicle regulations.
“We have spent a few years developing that into a position where we can ship out nine units in a 40ft container, which is then received by a local assembly partner.
“That itself has been a challenge in the pandemic, but we have become more tech savvy quite quickly, and we had done quite a lot of that before the pandemic started, we were already well down the road.”
Of the cash, in the form of a £141,000 grant and a £470,000 loan, Mr Berridge said: “It has helped us through this, having to expand on both 海角视频 and overseas fronts. It was quite a big stretch for us financially, and the help was definitely appreciated.”
Launched in 5,000 sq ft of space in 1990, it quickly expanded and the latest addition is a fourth site. “We’ve just started in there now, and are just scaling it up and it is now producing,” he said. “We are gradually building up the workforce. Our plan for this year is to produce over 1,000 bodies, and over the next three years expanding to 3,000.”
That increase will see the business as a whole double output from 2,000 units to 4,000.
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“There are a lot of parts to it, and we do manufacture a lot of our component parts,” Mr Berridge said of the £40 million operations, underlining how it is far from a pure assembly operation on home turf. “All of the sandwich panels we manufacture, a lot of the fabricating is in-house, the glass reinforced plastic moulding, and electrical wiring looms.
“Being self-reliant has been something of a saving grace throughout the last 12 months, as getting hold of materials has been a real challenge. We don’t have a lot of suppliers, but some companies stayed open purely because they were supporting us.”
Now a further 87 jobs are being created in Hull.
“The way we make panels is unique, so they are all trained by us,” he said. “There is a lot of automation too, the equipment we have put in at Sutton Fields is another step forward for us, and that is creating a different type of job. To get to 1,000 units is one level, to go further is a next phase - the next part of our automation journey.”
It is a far call from a piece of legislation that kicked it off - remembered more for Edwina Currie’s controversial salmonella comments in the run-up than for the real kick-on refrigerated trucks and stores were given by its introduction.
“In 1990, the Food Safety Act enshrined the concept of a full cold chain, and it was based on changing eating habits,” Mr Berridge said - with scratch cooking making way for convenience.
“We could see demand for portable coldstores, which we still manufacture, then we started on the vehicles.”
Paneltex now boasts the biggest vacuum presses in Europe. “We can make very large composite sandwich panels to form a monocoque body - 16m long in one piece - a suitable size for a modular building coldstore or blast freezer,” Mr Berridge said.
A trailer division is also a key part, though slammed into reverse when the pandemic struck, as last mile delivery exponentially accelerated having already been in growth.
“The bigger trucks, from March last year, no-one wanted them. Demand for big refrigerated vehicles and trailers fell dramatically, but our main speciality is the 3.5 tonne delivery, we serve a lot of major supermarkets and have a relatively high market share. There are other companies in it, but we have quite a lot of scale, we know we can produce large numbers relatively well and then the numbers become really important.”